Submitted by
Sizemore
Investment Letter
as part of our
contributors
program
In
recent weeks
, I've written that
Microsoft ($ MSFT)
will ultimately muscle-out
Apple ($ AAPL)
as the leader in smartphones and tablets. It will be a long
war of attrition, but Apple has no durable long-term
advantages-what Warren Buffett calls "moats"-to keep most of its
customers loyal. And Apple's insistence on controlling every
aspect of both its software and hardware puts it at a disadvantage
to a more flexible Microsoft. With
Nokia ($ NOK)
, Samsung, and other major manufacturers lining up to produce
Windows phones, we will likely see a very different smartphone
market a year from now. (To read the whole story, click here.
And to see what caused Nokia's share price to jump 30% last
week, see Nokia Lumia sells out in Germany.)
But what about
Google's ($ GOOG)
Android?
It may seem odd that Google gets barely a mention from me, given
that the Android operating system dwarfs both Apple and Microsoft
in market share. By some estimates (it depends on what your
threshold for "smartphone " is), Android has over 75% of the
market. And I myself carry an Android phone.
If you want to know why I don't take Google seriously as
a long-term competitor, consider my recent experience with Google
Play Music, which is Google's (shoddy) attempt to compete with
Apple's iTunes.
Google Play Music
sounds
great, in theory. It offers you the ability to upload your
entire music collection into the cloud and sync all of your mobile
devices to one library and one set of playlists. You can
stream the songs over the internet or keep copies locally on your
phone…or so I thought.
This is where I start to curse Google under my breath. Google
Play is incapable of syncing music to an SD card; it can only save
your music to your phone's internal memory. That's a problem
when you have 32 gigs available on your SD card and less than 2
gigs in the phone's internal storage.
This has been a "known issue" for over a year, and one that
Google should seemingly be able to fix in a matter of hours.
Yet in order to get Google Play Music to use my SD card, I had to
hack my phone with a jury-rigged scripting file.
Seriously?
You simply don't have these sorts of problems with Apple or
Microsoft. Why? Because they are real companies with
real business models. With a few exceptions, they actually
charge for their products and offer some degree of support.
Given that Google gives most of its products away for free, you
have to question how seriously they take them. And given my
experience with Play Music, the answer is "not very."
I should be clear that I am not forecasting an immediate
collapse in Google's share price. I simply have no way to
gauge the sustainability of their advertising model, so I find it
more prudent to invest elsewhere.
Disclosures: Sizemore Capital is long MSFT. This post first
appeared on TraderPlanet.
The post Microsoft Will Crush Google appeared first on Sizemore
Insights.
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