Fred and I, in collaboration with an entrepreneur to be named later, put our heads together via IM/e-mail (He's out sick today, but still can't unjack from the Matrix, so send him some get well comments) and came up with this chart. GM shed four bucks today on the news that it would post a loss of about $1.50 a share, versus the previous target of break-even. I know weathermen that can predict better than that. At the same time, Microsoft is trading at about 60% of its 2000 levels. As you can see from the chart, both companies have traded similarly on the way down. Coincidence? Yes. Relation? Not a bit. However, they do both fall into the same category: Companies that are too big to achieve sustainable growth and ones getting their lunch eaten by competitors that innovate better and act faster. I'm not sure what to expect sooner... Longhorn or a GTO that actually looks like a GTO. So does that make Toyota and Honda the Mozilla and Google of the car world? (Of course, that would also make Internet Explorer the Aztek of the browser world.)
The real challenge for these companies is focus. Both have lots of attractive products and also lots of properties that seem to be a bit adrift. The interesting thing is that GM has always been in the business of trying to get smaller, spinning off EDS, DirectTV, etc, while Microsoft never seems to waive the white flag on anything. The unfortunate thing at GM has been that these highly profitable sales haven't helped the business at all, with proceeds going into the black hole of pension benefits and medical expenses.
Another interesting comparison is the quality issue. GM's product quality has made great strides over the years, while Microsoft, well... you know.
Here's the question of the day. If Blackstone is successful in raising its highly anticipated trillion dollar buyout fund, differences in market cap aside, if you were Steve Schwartzman which company would you rather buy and try to turn around? Could you generate a better return from buyout GM, spinning off GMAC and slugging it out with the unions on the healthcare and benefit issues? Would you buy Microsoft and inspire some actual innovation or just milk it like a cash cow? (Since the company has been last to the party on, let's see now, search, blogging, what else is hot?) Perhaps I should start a MSFT vs. GM index on my blog to keep track of which would have been the better deal.