Steve Ballmer announces to retire from Microsoft in next 12 months

Steve Ballmer announces to retire from Microsoft in next 12 months on Thursday and the share increased by 6% on the same day.

Now Microsoft is looking for a new CEO. The new CEO is having a big challenge in front of him defining a proper strategy to catch up the lost strength over a decade to companies like Google, Apple, etc.

They lost billions of dollors by spending onBing search which never take off against Google search. Also they lost in cloud market, tablets and smart phones. It is going to be the responsibility of the new CEO io compete on every domain including their IE browser where they are loosing to chrome.

On office suit, still they have the on premise market share but their base in cloud is not so good. Many new vendors are there to take the market.

They have to look for a person like Morrisa Mayer present CEO of Yahoo. The contenders for the CEO of Microsoft includes, CEO of EBAY, señor VP of google Vic Gundotra who is taking care of social in Google. Vic was from Microsoft. Also there are few contenders from Microsoft itself like Qi lu, Tony Bates, and Satya Nadella.

It is time to see how a monopoli company is going to bounce back with the new CEO and compete with the present giants Google and Apple. Steve Balmmer should identify a correct visionary to lead Microsoft. Will Bill Gates be back as CEO of Microsoft?

Saravanan

Apple stock short-term increase after Carl Icahn tweet

Apple stock reached $500 after few months after the tweet by Carl Icahn. He met Tim cook CEO of Apple and made the tweet.

We currently have a large position in APPLE. We believe the company to be extremely undervalued. Spoke to Tim Cook today. More to come. 

Had a nice conversation with Tim Cook today. Discussed my opinion that a larger buyback should be done now. We plan to speak again shortly.

11:55 PM - 13 Aug 2013

This is going to be a short-term spike and Tim Cook has to think of future of Apple. This increase may continue for some more time as Apple is going to release the iPhone 6 in September. As there is no new innovation from them, the future of Apple is going to be stagnant. Apple's smartwatch is one of the major initiatives and nothing big to say.

Already Microsoft missed the growth by not investing on innovation and they sre struggling to grow where as the investment made by Google on Android is going to give a high growth to Google compared to Apple. In the recent past Google also started reducing its R&D spending that is a big concern.

Saravanan.

Solarwinds Share Slumps

After the Q2 2013 results from solarwinds, the share slumps drastically. It is happening for the third time this year. Solarwinds share slumps first ti me this year in April immediately after their Q1 2013 results. Then it went down on the day of the N-able acquisition.

In addition, most of the analysts down the value of Solarwinds shares.

Needham & Company downgraded SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI) from Buy to Hold following weak Q2 earnings.

analysts at Jefferies Group cut their price target on shares of SolarWinds from $59.00 to $45.00 

Analysts at Robert W. Baird cut their price target on shares of SolarWinds from $54.00 to $46.00

One good news is Zacks has upgraded the SWi rattings from under performing to neutral on August 1st. 

Solarwinds plans to repurchase $50M of its shares in the next 12 months. After this announcement, the shares started going up. Solarwinds is going to have a tough next few quarters. We have to wait and see the progress of it with the acquisition and grow strategy.

Companies that has the acquisition strategy like Google are facing tough time in the last couple of quarters. The cultural change will have impact on the growth of the company. We have to wait and watch how these companies are going to perform in future.

Saravanan