Rating:  Summary: finding high tech stock Review: I would be very interested in seeking and finding such stock for short and long term investing, firmly believe this is only the tip of the iceberg. I compare it to IBM some 40 or so years ago.
Rating:  Summary: The Gorilla Game Review: Let me qualify my remarks; I'm a Registered Investment Advisor. I make a living investing Other People's Money. I'm 67 years old, so you know I've been around for awhile. That said, Gorilla Investing is one of the best investment books I've ever read, and that covers a lot of ground, believe it! My only complaint is the high collateral cost of reading Geoff Moore's work. Highlighters! I burn 'em! (I wonder if his publisher has considered printing his books on yellow paper?)
Rating:  Summary: Solid concepts, but beware how you apply it! Review: Moore et. al. do an excellent job of presenting a coherent methodology that can be followed over time to invest in high technology. However, being both an investor and a technologist myself, I recommend to anyone wishing to follow this methodology to pick one or two market segments (e.g. Electronic Commerce software, IP telephony) and live, breathe, and sleep the chosen market segment: subscribe to newsletters, get to know each player, study the products of each company, talk to customers, etc. etc. Then, and ONLY THEN, will you be able to profit from the book's advice. At issue is the fact that in order to pick the winners inside a high growth market segment you MUST understand in depth what the technology is all about, what each company has to offer, their competitive advantage, market projections, potential entrants, etc. And then wish yourself some luck... But all in all, a great book!
Rating:  Summary: Outstanding book for the serious amateur high tech investor. Review: Practical guide to serious amateur investing in high technology companies. Relates investment thesis to the author's earlier books on high technology marketing. Useful both from an investing viewpoint and as a guide to value creation for managers of high technology companies.
Rating:  Summary: Conceptually good, practical maybe. Review: Provides a good framework for identifying upstarts that may become gorillas. Whether these concepts can be translated to profits remains to be seen. I seen too many strategies that look good on paper but fizzle out in practice. Nevertheless, the book is valualbe in making understandable how gorillas get to be that way.
Rating:  Summary: The Gorilla Game : Picking Winners in High Technology Review: Save your money. This is a typical 20/20 hind sight financial book. The authors back test their ideas to prove them .... why did'nt you buy Intel, Microsoft etc. when they were cheap? This book will not help you make investment decisions.
Rating:  Summary: The Gorilla Game : Picking Winners in High Technology Review: Save your money. This is a typical 20/20 hind sight financial book. The authors back test their ideas to prove them .... why did'nt you buy Intel, Microsoft etc. when they were cheap? This book will not help you make investment decisions.
Rating:  Summary: An Eye-Opener for Everyone Review: The book does a pretty good job demystifying high-tech industries, particularly from a competitive strategy point of view. This is a must read for at least three kinds of people: amature investors, high-tech investors who concentrate solely on financial statements (but know nothing about Michael Porter), and value investors who pick low pe stocks. This is an eye-opener particularly for traditional value investors: gorillas usually have the highest pe (or p/sales) of the industry, and yet they are the winners. The book is a little too long. The idea can be explained clearly and thoroughly in the equivalant of a journal article. Many of the materials are sugar-coated for unsophisticated investors. I think the book is overrated, but deserves a careful read.
Rating:  Summary: Great insight even for the non-investor Review: The high-tech stock collapse has led to a lot of agonized soul searching from burned investors in the past year. How in the world did all those dot-com pet stores get funded? How did Cisco ever get a $500 billion dollar market cap, and how did so many other companies get valued at tens of billions of dollars with no profits and little sales? Well, one problem was that too many people read this book. Don't get me wrong--Geoffrey Moore is definitely a heavyweight business thinker. His earlier books were tremendously helpful in explaining the strange, non-intuitive ways in which high-tech markets work. But here, he and his coauthors attempt to build on his earlier work to offer a "gorilla investment strategy", which has now become a victim of its own popularity. *Any* mechanical investment scheme will eventually fail if it becomes too widely used, and it is easy to find the roots of the investment idiocies of the late nineties in this book. Just look for emerging high-tech market leaders, he says over and over, with little attention paid to just how much this eventual market dominance might be worth. Worse, he asserts that you can't know which company will emerge as the dominant player in a given sector, so invest in them all. Venture capitalists, once they realized how many investors were following this strategy, responded by cranking out unlimited numbers of startups doing exactly the same thing; as long as they were competing in a market that might eventually select a "gorilla", then they could be confident of "flipping" a successful IPO to naive investors. Anyone who used this book as a basis for investing over the past couple of years would have, in effect, been getting suckered into a Ponzi scheme. Moore creates a vivid symbolic menagerie to explain the dynamics of high-tech marketing, but any high-tech investor needs to know that in addition to the authors' gorillas, chimpanzees and monkeys there are a lot of dogs. Also sharks.
Rating:  Summary: Oops Review: The high-tech stock collapse has led to a lot of agonized soul searching from burned investors in the past year. How in the world did all those dot-com pet stores get funded? How did Cisco ever get a $500 billion dollar market cap, and how did so many other companies get valued at tens of billions of dollars with no profits and little sales? Well, one problem was that too many people read this book. Don't get me wrong--Geoffrey Moore is definitely a heavyweight business thinker. His earlier books were tremendously helpful in explaining the strange, non-intuitive ways in which high-tech markets work. But here, he and his coauthors attempt to build on his earlier work to offer a "gorilla investment strategy", which has now become a victim of its own popularity. *Any* mechanical investment scheme will eventually fail if it becomes too widely used, and it is easy to find the roots of the investment idiocies of the late nineties in this book. Just look for emerging high-tech market leaders, he says over and over, with little attention paid to just how much this eventual market dominance might be worth. Worse, he asserts that you can't know which company will emerge as the dominant player in a given sector, so invest in them all. Venture capitalists, once they realized how many investors were following this strategy, responded by cranking out unlimited numbers of startups doing exactly the same thing; as long as they were competing in a market that might eventually select a "gorilla", then they could be confident of "flipping" a successful IPO to naive investors. Anyone who used this book as a basis for investing over the past couple of years would have, in effect, been getting suckered into a Ponzi scheme. Moore creates a vivid symbolic menagerie to explain the dynamics of high-tech marketing, but any high-tech investor needs to know that in addition to the authors' gorillas, chimpanzees and monkeys there are a lot of dogs. Also sharks.
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