Amazon into the future PLUS FB, FSLR, AAPL round up

What to say about Facebook? It’s in a class of its own. Did you know that if $FB rallies another 15% its current $120 level, that Facebook would be worth more than Microsoft?

$FSLR‘s first quarter earnings were pretty good relative to most any other energy company on the planet. But they’ve got some lumpiness to their revenue recognition and that hurt the stock some today. And the CEO leaving to be replaced by the CFO is probably also a little bit weighing on the stock. I’m not in a rush to add more to my $FSLR position during this part of the energy cycle.

I’d been saying that I thought $AAPL could hit $130 in 2016, and now I sorta feel like a sellside analyst lowering my price target, but I do think $120 is probably the upside potential for $AAPL for the next 9 months unless the iPhone 7 comes out and it’s amazing or something.

All right, let’s talk Amazon.

Amazon’s wildly expensive. But it’s been that way practically every day that I’ve ever owned this stock over the years. And you know what, Jeff Bezos isn’t perfect. Remember the Fire Phone? That was a loser. Remember when he blew what was a huge chunk of his cash at the time, $60 million, investing in Kozmo at the height of the dot.com bubble back in March 2000?

NY Times: AMAZON.COM INVESTS $60 MILLION IN KOZMO – Mar 21, 2000 – Amazon.com, the biggest Internet retailer, said yesterday that it hadinvested $60 million in Kozmo.com, an online home-delivery service.

Heard of Kozmo? No. Yeah, it died 13 months later. Bezos was 15 years too early on the same day home delivery vision, which is something now available in 27 cities in the US.

But you want the CEOs of the Revolutionary Companies you invest in to have vision (see: Mark Zuckerberg as today’s other prime example of wanting your Revolutionary Companies to have a visionary at their head). And having a vision means you have to be willing to experiment and create new potential platforms. Amazon is more focused than ever on platform creation, as evidenced by the Echo, the Amazon App Store, Amazon Video, Amazon Music, Amazon Prime and so on.

Finding platforms that other technologies, businesses, applications and services get built on top of is one of the most important keys to long-term Revolution Investing. I explained for the Financial Times back in 2007, when the iPhone, with its limited capabilities was still a year away from having Apple reveal the App Store itself, why this platform concept was so important as it relates to the smartphone:

“It’s this idea of riding the internet ‘platform’ that is so crucial to investing in technology. In coming years, your mobile phone will become increasingly like your laptop. You’ll have the same programs running on each of them. VoIP software, YouTube and other video sites and browser-based applications will work on any high-end phone just as they work on your laptop.

There will even be iChat-like real-time video chat applications on your mobile phone – riding the browser-platform that rides the internet-protocol platform.

Google and Apple remain the best plays on this converged platform concept.”

I still own my Google and Apple and a couple other of the best platform companies on the planet, including Amazon (and Facebook, by the way, collectively, what I’ve called the Four Horsemen of Tech here on Marketwatch for many years now). Amazon’s a big platform company these days. Let me list some of the ways.

Amazon’s Prime and Prime Video services are probably the single closest competitor to Netflix right now, and Prime Video is just a fraction of the size giving it marketshare to take directly from Netflix. And the fact that it comes as part of the broader Amazon Prime service makes it a practically free and still very real alternative to cable/satellite TV.

Amazon Echo is becoming a platform in its own right and has stolen the promise of what Siri was once supposed to be. People actually talk to it and the reviews say it works most of the time quite well and people even listen to music on it.

Amazon Web Services is yet another great example of how Bezos has this company focused on building platforms. Millions of websites and apps and corporate networks are being built on the AWS platform and those businesses will essentially be locked into the AWS platform for decades to come.

Oh yeah, as for Amazon’s primary of being a retailer? Well, Amazon’s dominance as the retailer of the US is stronger than ever. And same day home delivery is now reality in many metro areas. Though they don’t call it Kozmo.

As for earnings tonight? Expectations are probably quite high, the stock has been straight up for weeks and if they don’t deliver a Facebook-esque quarter, the stock could be down a bit tomorrow.

Revenues and earnings and any hints to what the Prime Membership and/or Prime Video numbers are probably the most important metrics the market will be focusing on from Amazon’s report tonight.

I plan on holding my Amazon long no matter what the company reports tonight because when I look at all these platforms Bezos is creating, I think we’ve got a lot more growth ahead. And I continue to work on creating platforms of my own along the way too.