I'm going out on a limb and saying Bing's merits have little to do with this deal. Microsoft invested $240M in Facebook in 2007 so of course Facebook is going to be drinking their Kool-Aid.

Are you for real? +3 Informative? Net neutrality is about making sure Internet access providers do not discriminate against content providers which is pretty much the exact opposite of what you think it is.

Amen. I'm a former subscriber to both WSJ and IBD. WSJ front page was worthwhile and IBD charts were awesome but the rest of those papers were pretty much one big op-ed section. Still searching for suitable replacements.

Picking nits here but people subscribe to WSJ and FT for business, economic and financial news. General news organizations just don't devote enough resources to do a good job covering those specialized topics. "Stock information" in the form of publicly available data is free from Yahoo, Google, CNBC, TheStreet.com and plenty other sites.

Mod up! I've used pretty much every Microsoft OS since DOS 3.x and many of their development and enterprise products. Clearly things have gotten tremendously better over that time but I long ago stopped trusting them after decades of dealing with mediocre products, Linux FUD attacks and DOJ investigation shenanigans. There's really nothing they can do now to reverse that.

No doubt there's some iPhone cannibalism but, in the end, the iPhone is a huge net positive for Apple. Also, don't write off the iPod just yet. Not everyone is going to buy a iPhone/Android/whatever. Unit sales are essentially flat year over year despite the new crop of improved smartphones.

2) The whole investing thing is about growing profits. If a company doesn't grow then neither will its value. Microsoft's share price is flat over the trailing 5 years yet Apple is up 400%. That's no accident. Hey maybe you're risk averse and don't care for the high beta of a fast grower and that's cool but I wouldn't be chalking up Apple's success to faddish products.

iPod has been around for 9 years so I don't see how that's a fad. If people are switching to a converged device then it's mostly to the iPhone. I guess that's a fad too.

It'll be interesting to see how this shakes out. They're basically betting they'll eventually make more money from subscriptions than from advertising. FT and WSJ can do a paywall because their news is very specialized but a regular newspaper is going to have a tough time without offering something unique.

Let's look at facts instead of hyperbole.

1. The iPod has been around for almost nine years and iPhone for three years. Hardly a hyped up fad that will disappear overnight. The Walkman lost its relevance when CDs came out. Perhaps there's a new disruptive music technology sometime in the future but we'd be hard pressed to name it right now.

2. Microsoft's earnings are flat over three years while Apple's has more than doubled. That's not even including the iPad. Microsoft's growth will come from Windows 7, server and office products but that's mostly coming from corporate spending which is still down in the dumps. Xbox is basically a break even product line so it's not even worth mentioning in this conversation.

Well if we're gonna talk about current and future PE then we need to look at PEG. IBM's PEG is 1.01 and AAPL's is 1.11. That's about a 10% difference but it's hard to argue that either is outrageously mispriced.

What's unresolved for the island? Ben and Hugo are the new caretakers and apparently did well for a long time. Smoke Monster is dead. Everything's peachy.

It doesn't have to be a household name to be important. Dynamics GP is a major player in the small and medium business ERP space so it's actually a big f***ing deal.

This whole argument is severely weakened if the approved applications meet all or most of one's needs. Then we're not talking about limitations but what kind of utility one gets for the extra $250.

I thought the same thing initially but then I thought about it a little more and found one way it could work. HP obviously just doesn't know how to make/market mobile devices (see the puny sales from Jornada and iPaq) so just slapping Android into an iPaq isn't going to help.

Instead, buy Palm who is actually pretty darn good at it and give their management and engineering teams gobs of money and marketing muscle to work with. Then buy out of the Sprint exclusivity and they got a chance to move some phones.

On the other hand, if Palm disappears into the HP borgness then it'll likely be mismanaged to hell by the same people who've failed for a decade to do anything meaningful in the mobile market.

Why would HP buy Palm and then make Android devices? They pretty much have to use WebOS which they just bought.

High profit margin != market share. Conversely, high market share != high profit margin.