Nintendo Weeee!

Microsoft announced a few days ago that it had crossed the 10-million-units-sold-in-the-US boundary with its popular Xbox 360. If you believe Microsoft, then as far as the games market goes, this is like crossing the Rubicon to march on Rome. Microsoft deduces that it has won “the console war.” Microsoft was, just like Hillary Clinton, in it to win it. It planned well, got to market first and was the presumptive nominee. Nintendo was Barack Obama and Sony, if we are to pursue the analogy, was John Edwards.

Nintendo ruined Microsoft’s whole primary campaign with it’s message of change, and Microsoft is now reduced to manipulating the math to prove it can win. “We got to 10-million-units-sold-in-the-US first is the “we won all the big states that matter” argument. Nintendo sold over 700,000 units in April and will sell a similar number in May. At that point in time it will likely pass Micosoft’s Xbox sales figures pass and it will have done so in just over 18 months from a standing start. After that the Nintendo Wii will be elected president.

Address-Spaced Out

The OECD is warning that the Internet is likely to run out of IP addresses by 2011, if it expands at the current rate with a billion new users last year. Currently the OECD tells us, 85 percent of all available Internet addresses are already in use. This leaves me wondering whether IP v6 will finally get adopted, giving us the address space we’ve all been hankering after - one that will allow every atom in the universe to have a unique IP address. That will probably fix the problem - until we start putting RFID tags on atoms.

The OECD said that governments should adopt an updated IP network which should provide an almost unlimited number of addresses and help drive the rollout of broadband, internet-connected mobile phones, sensor networks and new services.

Yes Icahn

You can think of Carl Icahn as a proactive arbitrager if you like. It was Icahn who bought a stake in BEA and walked it into Oracle’s hands using what can only be described as financial logic. The logic runs like this:

IF a company has no utterly dominant shareholders

AND

A big fish wants to buy it at a premium to its current stock price

AND

No-one believes it can acquire that value through its own immediate plans

THEN

It should sell to the big fish.

This means you Yahoo! And that’s why Icahn has pushed a proportion of his handsome pile of cash into Yahoo! (giving him a 4% holding). He intends to replace the current Yahoo! board with one that understands the meaning of words “the interests of the shareholders.”

To quote the good man himself, addressing Yahoo:

“It is unconscionable that you have not allowed your shareholders to choose to accept an offer that represented a 72% premium over Yahoo’s closing price of $19.18 on the day before the initial Microsoft offer.”

Incidentally, Icahn has played this game before and lost (with Time Warner for example), so there are no guarantees that he’s going to pull it off this time. There’s no evidence either that Microsoft will come back to the table, but nevertheless Yahoo’s stock has climbed 10% since Icahn stepped in.