Microsoft seems cheap

[kcowan]

I agree Microsoft is no longer a growth stock - but the operating system business will be an incredible "cash cow" for many years to come.

Is it properly valued as a "value" stock?

 

[Marquette]

Because supporting Macs is going to require less work.

How often do Macs need to be re-imaged? Less than PCs

How often do Macs get viruses? Less than PCs

The simplification of having one hardware vendor would make support much cheaper as well.

You were referring to the business environment specifically. When is the last time you were at a company and they weren't standardized on one hardware vendor for desktops? I can't think of the last time I've seen that. Or, at most, two vendors if one little department insists they need macs to do their job.

I fully suspect that virus infections are related to market penetration. Frankly, if I'm going to write a virus, I'm going to target the biggest market. Given the stories available, I believe there may be nearly as many vulnerabilities on the Mac, they just haven't been exploited in any large fashion yet.

On MSFT, the next few years will be interesting. I have no facts, but lots of stories. I can't find many people excited about Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008. I'm going to Visual Studio 2008 just because. If I had to pay out of my own pocket for it, I wouldn't.

One friend is a Microsoft certified trainer, he's not renewing his certification this year. Another friend is a certified dev (MCSD), he's going over to Linux and OSX and writing everything in Scheme or Ruby now. I'm probably going to start investing more of my time in Python and C for my side work just to diversify my skill set.