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Comment by jcampbell1 | Hacker News Reader

> This is Microsoft's ICQ moment

Is that a reference to ICQ's "Uh-oh"? If so, I fully agree.

If Apple stock is priced to perfection, MSFT is priced to stupidity. This kind of wasted earnings is exactly why Microsoft stock sells at a mere 10x earnings. Investors are fully aware that a large portion of all future earnings will be wasted.

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No it's not. MSFT is just a sane stock priced my normal investors who want a balanced portfolio and don't believe in fairy tales.

You are ignoring the facts, Microsofts stock price assumes they are not going to generate incremental profits from their new businesses such as Bing, or the Windows phone. I won't comment on whether I think that is accurate, but it is simply what the current valuation implies.

I think this is a reference to AOL buying ICQ.

I don't understand. AOL bought ICQ for 400M, got patent exclusivity to IM for some time, sold a bazillion ad dollars during the dotcom boom through the ICQ client, and then sold the company recently for 200M. I am sure AOL came out ahead on that deal. What is an ICQ moment?

Though in terms of your average joe, no one seems to know about ICQ anymore. Those that do seem to remember it as something of the past (remember those days when we all chatted on ICQ?). Ironically though in Australia it was MSN that took over the market from ICQ. I guess because so many people had a hotmail account and the client came with their computer. Now if only people would switch so quickly to Jabber/XMPP as they did then, though I guess it would help if a popular phone manufacturer would do this by default.

MSN had one killer feature for me over ICQ. Server-side friend lists. When my PC was replaced - my MSN list was there. My ICQ had to be re-added.

This was eventually added to ICQ but probably too late.

Maybe for the average Joe in the US, but it's still widely used around the world.

I specifically mentioned Australia. Though I have observed trends for IM market share vary a lot more in different countries. So it's probably true that there is still some country where ICQ dominates. By the way, isn't AOL IM still the main game in the US?

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