If you consider the PEG ratio of both, you'll actually see that when taking growth rate into consideration, Apple is still cheaper than Microsoft...barely. So, if you put faith in PEG ratios, Apple is still a better buy. If you don't know what a PEG ratio is, check it out here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEG_ratio
I got it....didn't think I did at first. The email address I have on my Y Combinator account is different than the one I put on my application. Maybe some of you did the same????
Maybe you should focus on building your product and utilize a service that will be able to scale better than you will be able to do on your own. Check out Amazon Web Services http://aws.amazon.com/ . There are a lot of big sites using their EC2 and S3 services...you should check these out. That said, I am not a scaling expert, so if you're hell bent on doing it yourself, good luck! I'm sure somebody on here will be able to offer you "do it yourself" advice.
oh, we have no desire to do it ourselves. We only started using our own server because of the politics of hosting university content offsite. It makes the relations with the professors easier.
I've been looking for ways to move storage and bandwidth to AWS, but just set up my own personal account with JungleDisk a couple of weeks ago. What utilities do you recommend for shifting webserver stuff to AWS? What can be pushed? As I understand it, it's strictly blobs, and all data manipulation still has to come back to the site's CPU for processing. Am I mistaken?
Convertible Debt is a popular instrument currently. Make sure you understand it though. What is it convertible to? This typically means that you intend to allow your debt holders to convert their investment to stock offered at the time of accepting Series A (or next round) funding....and they convert it at a discount....and the interest accrued is converted to stock at the same discount. Typically the max time frame for the debt is 1 year (securities issues I believe...has to be registered if longer), so if you don't anticipate taking additional funding in the near future, convertible debt is probably not for you. We could discuss this forever, but thats enough for now.
this is my point...great when you have several highly motivated creative people (like 37signals), but what about "most" companies? I have several friends who would absolutely take advantage of this type of atmosphere by not doing sh*t. They would be fired in smaller companies, but lost in the shuffle of larger ones. Now you are focusing on house cleaning.
Also, earnings for MSFT are about $17B and AAPL is about $11B