Amazon has been operating at near breakeven point for a long time. Most of the years the make some money, sometimes they lose a bit.
Their stock holds up because they increase their revenue, and market share, at a huge speed. This is reasonable. In fact, that's what most startup companies do after raising Series A, B, C, etc. funding - they usually spend a lot more than they make (i.e. "burn" cash) with the goal to grow the market share as quickly as possible. Amazon is a public company with significant cashflows, so they use internal funds to grow.
Here're the latest approximate revenue/profits number from Amazon (all in billion):
2007: $14 / $0.5
2008: $19 / $0.6
2009: $24 / $0.9
2010: $34 / $1.1
2011: $48 / $0.6
2012: $61 / $(0.04) (loss of $40 million)
This is a very impressive growth (in revenue) for a large company. Having said that, one day it will stop, so by then Amazon will need to show impressive earnings, or its stock may get punished.
The threat from Android to iPhone probably looks bigger than it actually is. Per study that just came out [1], iPhone users are much more loyal than Android users: 24% of Android users plan to switch vs. 9% of iPhone users. If this persists, Android users will over time "leak over" to iPhone.
I, personally, am not that pleased with my Android phone. The present trend might be in Apple's favor, but, presumably, Apple will have to keep executing well to maintain that momentum.
We've built a complete continuous deployment system with TeamCity/MSBuild that worked quite well for us. It probably took about two-three weeks to work out all the details, and now it's been running for over a year with almost no modifications.
Our Git/TeamCity/MSBuild-based build server rebuilds/upgrades the database (SQL Server), builds a web app, and a ClickOnce desktop app installer package. Everything is then copied to the target web site. At the end of each build we have a fully functional web app + downloadable desktop app (the desktop app also auto-updates if it's already running somewhere).
We use NUnit to develop unit tests, but TeamCity has it's own NUnit runner that nicely reports unit test stats and any failures.
Production deployment is slightly different - the build box pushes everything to git, and production boxes pull the latest version from git.
I did have to copy a couple of directories from Visual Studio to the build box. I guess that's the dependency everyone is talking about. I ended up with just copying a couple of things (and documenting them somewhere) rather than installing the entire Visual Studio.
One thing I didn't get to is automating C++ builds on the build box. We have some C++ dependencies. Fortunately, those almost never change, so we build them manually, commit binaries to git, and the build process picks them up from there.
All in all, it was a pretty good experience. I didn't even have to use PowerShell that much. Ordinary cmd-scripts were sufficient for most tasks. The git command line interface is quite rich, even though it can be confusing at times (but stackoverflow typically has the answers).
If you're interested in any specific items, feel free to email me.
I think it reflects the general Microsoft philosophy of having APIs for everything. After all, they are an API company. It shows in the PowerShell design with it's object API approach.
Also, with the API you should be able to configure IIS without restarting it, while changing web.config recycles web apps (in ASP.NET scenario). With load-balancing, however, this is less of an issue.
It would be interesting to know what the median valuation is. Half the startups will be above it, and half below it. This would provide additional interesting details.
Some businesses are fundamentally high-margin, and some are low-margin. It mostly depends on the amount of raw materials involved.
For example, Microsoft (software) is a high-margin business. Their cost of raw materials is low, so 77% of revenues goes to pay for R&D, other expenses, and then profit.
Apple is a lower, but still a high-margin business with healthy 37% of revenues remaining after paying for the cost of materials and assembly. Apple can charge significantly more for their devices than they pay in raw material costs. But it may change, so Apple investors are generally watching its gross margins. For example, last year Apple's margin was 47%, i.e. it declined quite a bit since then.
Amazon (as any retailer) is a low-margin business. They move a lot of products, but 89% of the revenue goes to pay for those product. So only 11% of the total revenue is available for R&D costs and profit.
Most definitely. He may well be completely innocent per numerous laws, executive orders and/or the Constitution. An example of the relevant recent piece:
"Executive Order 13526:
Sec. 1.7. Classification Prohibitions and Limitations.
(a) In no case shall information be classified, continue to be maintained as classified, or fail to be declassified in order to:
(1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error.."
IANAL, but I really don't think that EO (which is not a law) means that you can unilaterally declassify something which you think conceals a violation of law. Also, I'm not aware of anything Snowden disclosed that shows the NSA broke any laws. The FISA court signed off on this stuff, no?
Right. The determinant as to whether information is classified is its effect on national security if widely known.
You don't classify innocuous material just because it might be embarrassing.
But on the other hand you can classify material that risks national security even if it also happens to be embarrassing.
In any event PRISM itself is 0.01% or so in actuality as it was claimed to be, I'm not even sure I'd call PRISM itself embarrassing (it's just a damn web service). The laws under which PRISM operate might be different, but that's not something we can pin on NSA, and it's not something that was secret anyways.
>You don't classify innocuous material just because it might be embarrassing.
You're wrong. That's a well-known, ongoing, and acknowledged problem in the US which even has its own act of Congress as an attempt to deal with the problem.
Who knows? The "court" meets in secret. Its rulings are secret. I'm not even certain that NSA is bound in any meaningful to abide by their decision/advice.
Their stock holds up because they increase their revenue, and market share, at a huge speed. This is reasonable. In fact, that's what most startup companies do after raising Series A, B, C, etc. funding - they usually spend a lot more than they make (i.e. "burn" cash) with the goal to grow the market share as quickly as possible. Amazon is a public company with significant cashflows, so they use internal funds to grow.
Here're the latest approximate revenue/profits number from Amazon (all in billion):
2007: $14 / $0.5
2008: $19 / $0.6
2009: $24 / $0.9
2010: $34 / $1.1
2011: $48 / $0.6
2012: $61 / $(0.04) (loss of $40 million)
This is a very impressive growth (in revenue) for a large company. Having said that, one day it will stop, so by then Amazon will need to show impressive earnings, or its stock may get punished.