Week in review Dec 2 to Dec 8

1) All remaining CompUSA stores to be closed (bloomberg). I think it’s understandable from business point of view, because selling computer is a tough business these days. It is a commodity business, and unlike other commodity such as gas or coffee, a customer only buy a new PC/laptop once every a few years.

Similarly, I can understand Dell computer lackluster financial performance lately, and its decision to sell PCs at BestBuy (reuter news). People used to buy Dell because it offers most bang (more disk and memory, faster CPU, etc) for the buck, but nowadays people buy computer and electronics not solely for the “bangs”, they look for the brand, design, fashion (think Apple iBook, MacBook).

2) MacroVision (MVSN), the licensing software company, announced to buy GemStar-TV Guide (San Jose Mercury News). Normally when company A buys company B, the company A stock will drop, and company B stock will rise. In this case, interestingly, both companies’ stock drop big. I, for one, can not understand why a software company will buy a traditional magazine company.

3) This is going to be a bit controversial, NetEase (NTES) released a new search, sexy search. I know in China, Internet is much more liberal than the US, for instance, the web site of (China official news agency) Xinhua has similar beauty too (Victoria secret model).

But I am still puzzled why a smart guy like Ding Lei (Chairman of NetEase) will offer this kind of search. Maybe because NetEase can not catch up Baidu in terms of regular web search ?

4) Last but not least, I need to make a correction about Baidu Finance. I said in my previous post that Baidu Finance appears copycated from Yahoo Finance China, this is no longer true when they offically released as you can see from the new Baidu Finance.

Besides the numbers and tables, Baidu seems organize financial articles well, and it has links to the original articles (it is a search engine after all).