All Things Digital

The ongoing collapse of Motorola’s post-Razr phone business is not due to a failure of innovation and leadership. Nor is it the result of a string of management, marketing and product blunders. No. Motorola’s decline isn’t Motorola’s fault at all. It’s Apple’s. Specifically, it’s the fault of Michael Fenger, Apple’s VP of global iPhone sales. Read more »

Thanks largely to Thursday's disappointing earnings reports from Microsoft and Google, sentiment on tech stocks was terrible on Friday, driving down share prices across the board. One notable victim was Apple, which fell $6.66 (Satanic!), or 3.9 percent, to $165.15. Read more »

So, there are a couple of ways to think about Google's (GOOG) big post-second-quarter sell-off this morning. For starters, as I noted last night, there seems to be increasing evidence that online advertising is actually feeling the effects of the slower economy. Read more »

Well, look who missed analyst expectations by a penny. Microsoft. Though the company Thursday reported 18 percent in revenue growth and 21-percent growth in earnings for its fourth quarter, its 32-percent growth in per-share earnings didn’t quite meet Wall Street expectations. Read more »

A lot of people have been piling on CBS for its deal to buy Web site operator CNET Networks for $1.8 billion in cash. Not BoomTown. And it is not because newly crowned CBS Interactive CEO Quincy Smith is the ever-amusing Energizer Bunny of the Internet. Okay, CBS paid too much and that makes the whole thing suspect. But is it the wrong direction? Read more »

Stifel Nicolaus analyst Scott Devitt this morning cut his rating on Overstock.com (OSTK) to Sell from Hold. He notes that the company, which reported second-quarter financial results this morning, trades for 21×2009 EBITA, "the highest multiple in the sector." Read more »

Yahoo’s latest broadside against the “Microsoft-Icahn agenda†has struck a chord with a key investor: Legg Mason Capital Management. The firm on Friday threw its support behind Yahoo, saying it will vote its 4.4 percent stake in Yahoo (60.7 million shares) against the slate of dissident directors presented by investor-agitator Carl Icahn. Read more »

Listening to all the birds-on-a-wire chatter about what will happen in the latest round of the never-ending Microsoft-Yahoo saga, it's still hard to know what to think, given the ever-increasing noise around the proceedings, which will continue until Yahoo's Aug. 1 shareholder meeting. Yesterday, it got louder still as Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock and CEO Jerry Yang sent out far and wide yet another stinkbomb letter, calling activist investor Carl Icahn a money-grubbing "corporate agitator." Well, yes--not that there's anything wrong with that! Read more »