Last week M.A. ended on a high note - M$.NET. What one wonders is whatever happened to all the good names for stuff. When I was a kid, marketers were still working overtime to get into the limelight, to get their product on the lips of every consumer everywhere. Products had names like QT and had nifty jingles to go along with them (everybody remember the QT jingle?). It didn’t matter how horrible the product was, people knew about it and they bought it because of the great job at marketing. And in the software realm, things were written and tested to the extent that there were no bugs, mainly because it wasn’t an easy task to ship out patches on disk to all the people who bought the program.

Nowadays such is no more. With marketing giving way to drab advertising, names like Blue Blockers gave way to the alternative: Sunglasses 2.5. In fact, M$ is generally the best example of this. They make a product so much they rely upon the existing consumer base. The result is a program name like Word, with an issue number like 9.0 after it. Well, M$ has gone about a slightly new naming scheme for their Office series of products. Now they add .NET to the end, and begin their next major project. The goal is to start turning the internet into a massively connected environment over which a developer can integrate pretty much any available services from a remote system into his program. The actual result is a program which won’t really work as it is intended for the first few years until everyone figures out how powerful the program really is. It also has a rather banal name. In my opinion, if M$ would spend a little more time on naming things, they would be even further in the lead. They had it right with a name like “Excel”, but “Word” and “Access” just don’t cut it in my book.

AMD Stock Options
AMD has been a bit rocky recently. Following their massive price jump on the release of the new processor, the stock split in August, and has been tumbling in price ever since. The NASDAQ just hit a new 52-week low, and we don’t know how long it will keep dropping. What we want to know is whether or not it will keep dropping. Should one unload what stock they have, and cut their losses? I would say now is the time to buy more AMD stock. They won’t stay down for too long, and when they bounce back, I would guess they are going to bounce back strong.