Internet Investment Opportunities
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Written by tolumi
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Friday, 05 December 2008 11:09 |
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Internet Investment Opportunities One big uncertainty seems to revolve around the future of the software service companies that seemed to rule the world last year while we were all worrying about the Millennium Bug. Many have found themselves over-expanded and unable to cope with the lower levels of demand now that the fateful date is safely behind us, and the survivors are the ones that have gone into consultancy and database development. The big thing at the moment is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) - the use of intelligent database systems to extract the maximum marketing data from a company’s existing customer records, and the ability to provide tailor-made, short-run solutions based on the resulting findings. Internet Investment Opportunities & IBM IBM’s recent link-up with CRM specialist Siebel is only the most visible of these trends. Another possible casualty is one of the oldest companies in the sector - relatively speaking, of course. Many analysts think that Yahoo!, the internet directory that led the investor charge into dot.coms all those years ago, is now getting past its best. With an estimated p/e of 90, the old warhorse has been turning itself gradually into a kind of news portal (an internet showcase for other media products and services), and the cynics reckon that it’s too expensive to be viable in this highly competitive end of the service market. Besides, they say, the advertising revenues that these portal sites depend on have plummeted recently as the dot.com companies ditch their publicity budgets. Internet Investment Opportunities - Capital Gain From Yahoo Better, they say, to pocket your 4,000% capital gain from Yahoo! (over the last five years) and invest it somewhere else. Yahoo!’s share price has dropped by a third since the spring. All of which leaves us more or less where we came in. Whoever it was who said that constant change was here to stay could perfectly well have been talking about high tech investment. The rules are constantly being made up as we go along, and every so often they get completely overthrown by some new development. You can’t rely on anything these days. But then, perhaps that’s just part of the fun.
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Last Updated on Tuesday, 06 January 2009 14:05 |