I believe computers help us to connect with our fellow humans in ways that otherwise would not be possible.

Apples and oranges. Both companies have high development costs for their products, but once developed MSFT’s product costs next to nothing to produce. Remember years ago when AOL would send you 2-3 CDs a week hoping you’d sign up? MSFT’s products don’t cost much more than each one of those mailings (actually some are entirely electronic and cost less than one penny).

Oh, and MSFT’s stock price doesn’t plummet every time one of its products crashes.

But Ballmer plans to spen half of it buying MS stock. Big mistake. $22.5B simply can have little to zero mathematical effect on a company values at over 1 Trillion. MS was way overvalued.

Boeing has something like 10 time the MS’s gross revenue on a per stock share basis. MS simply does not have a managment that has the brains to grow beyond the monopoly of the OS business. They make all new ventures have this requirement “It backs up the MS OS Monopoly” and make all new venture lack this requirment “profit”.

What I mean is this, MS would have been better off starting farms grwoing oranges in Florida, ratehr than so much investment in the marginal returns of propping up the monopoly with game machine (now a loss venture) and Embedded Windows (makes close to zero profit). The emotional attachment to the OS monopoly wont let their management think clearly.

I can’t get a source all the way back to 2001, but October 2002 Money Magazine had a bubble article, and picked Seattle as one of three cities most likely to pop, citing Economy.com as their source.

Some people like, um, Ardell?

Just kidding, but that is the perception from some native Seattelites who think those dang Californians migrated in and “ruined our town”. There is probably a lot of truth to the idea that the Seattle bubble was fed by the bigger California bubble nearby.

I was in CA in 2001 and the bubble started there in 1998. Seems to me that some people from CA bought in WA, starting the bubble here, because prices were getting out of whack there first. Does that sound right?

That’s when it started. Prices weren’t too out of whack because it was just the beginning. But it’s pretty clear that prices were off. You even said it yourself: “When the dot-com bust occurred, the loss of all the option money didn’t seem to have a great effect on prices.”

“The people making the predictions back then missed predicting the top by almost 100%.”

Just because prices didn’t fall in a given time period doesn’t mean a bubble wasn’t forming. Apparently you define a bubble as a time when prices fall. Most people would call the the bursting of the bubbble. I don’t know of anyone that called the top in 2001, but if it makes you feel smarter to pretend that there were people calling the top, then good for you.