On Dec. 30, with just a couple of hours left in the penultimate trading session of the year, Apple’s shares hit $87.99 and seemed to be well on their way back to $90. But before they could break $88, claims that Steve Jobs’s declining health is the real reason the Apple CEO won’t deliver the keynote at Macworld 2009 cut the legs out from under them. The rumor was quickly dismissed, but not before AAPL plunged to $85.04.
The stock market’s performance this past year isn’t the only thing that’s charting historic lows. According to preliminary December metrics from Net Applications, the share of the browser market held by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has slipped below 70 percent.
With the economy in contraction and the stock market going all to hell, 2008 was not a good year for the IPO market. In fact, volumewise, it’s looking like it was one of the worst in the last 13 years. Global IPO activity has more than halved since 2007, according to Ernst & Young’s year-end Global IPO update.
Microsoft must be so proud. The company’s $240 million investment in Facebook, one that implicitly valued the social network at $15 billion, hasn’t yet paid off. But it will. In three years or so when Facebook finally settles on a business model. Assuming, of course, it’s a viable one.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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