[steve8918]

I read Bronte Capital all the time. He is a hedge fund manager in Australia, and it very good at sniffing out fraudulent stocks or short-worthy stocks and shorting them.

I'm not too confident in his ability to assess technology though, and I think he may be a bit premature on this MSFT call.

I do believe that Windows 8 is a mistake made out of desperation. Given that the change in interface will confuse a lot of people, I think enterprise will be wary of making the switch because of all the massive retraining it will require. Any type of little change in enterprise environments will always require retraining, so I think enterprise adoption will be very slow to adopt. Maybe MSFT will wake up and change the interface back and have some sort of switch to change back-and-forth before it ships a final version though.

[mcguire]

* Prediction: this will wind up with a lower corporate take up rate than Vista (ie next to none).*

* Prediction 2: this will accelerate, rather than slow down, the rate at which enterprises take their enterprise specific software into platform independent programs*

* Prediction 3: by stuffing this up Microsoft has just about lost its bet on moving the retail computer market into docking cloud computers. Apple will do this. And they will do it by stealth.*

Unfortunately, Microsoft seems to have survived Vista experience without too much injury. And having had some experience with enterprise platform movements, accelerating a "glacial" speed is still pretty slow. And finally, I still have doubts about Apple's capability and interest in the general "retail computer market". (Although I could be wrong about that.)