Is corporate IT spending showing signs of life?
Jefferies enterprise software analyst Katherine Egbert thinks so. She issued about a flurry of research notes today, saying various nice things about the improving climate, lifting targets and estimates for an assortment of stocks.
In theory, getting users to ditch one Internet search engine for another should be an easy sell. But doing so is likely to cost Microsoft every penny of the roughly $100 million it plans to spend on an advertising campaign that starts Wednesday for its new Bing search engine.
In economist speak, there are virtually no “switching costs” for a consumer that wants to change from one search engine to another, other than the burden of typing Bing.com into a Web browser instead of Google.com.
The powers-that-be definitely do not reward every virtuous (according to Wall Street) corporate act, but there is the rare bit of recognition every now and then. Merrill Lynch analyst Raimo Lenschow upped his rating on enterprise software giant SAP on the basis of cost-cutting maneuvers the company has implemented. Wall Street loves a belt-tightening story.
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