kedrosky, finance reporter keri geiger. is "taking stock." ♪ >> this is "taking stock" for friday, october 3, 2014. i'm pimm fox. while the ebola virus is making headlines as cross the globe, another more widespread virus is causing concerns for health officials here in the united states. it is called etrovirus 68 and more than 500 people in 42 states have already been ickened. joining me from california is a doctor. she's the service chief of pediatric infectious diseases at a children's hospital at stanford. thank you very much for being with us. describe for people that may t be familiar with e.v. -- evd-68, what is it? >> it is one of a very large family of very common viruses. there are over 120 of these viruses, primarily affecting children. and they cause common illnesses of childhood. there are no treatments available for these and they generally resolve on their own. and it appears that evd-68 has been causing -- rarely causing severe illness in children with underlying respiratory conditions such as asthma and mor

it is some thing they have never done. >> paul kedrosky, joe brown, stay with us.e'll all -- we are all over apple. they unveiled two larger iphones last month, including the iphone6+. and the report shows tablet sales growth slowing, while smartphone sales are projected to grow 62% this year. tablet start to become irritable and? be right back with more. ♪ >> welcome back. we are live in cupertino at apple headquarters where tim on stage.een speaking he reiterated that the apple watch will be coming out next year. sam grobart, give us the latest from new york. sales cook updated on figures and then talked about the apple watch. he was talking about it in the context of russian, making a joke about it being for people who know a lot more about fashion than he does. he wears pretty much the same thing for all of these events. then the stage went to the apple software chief who is providing updates about ios 8 and is about to talk about os 10 yosemite. >> tim cook cracking jokes about fashion. a lot of black shirts in the room, appear early. thank you. with every new

we also have paul kedrosky still with us.his is an intriguing case the goes back to some of the most basic precepts of employment law. >> that's right. thank you for having me. this goes back to the fair labor standards act. in the 30's, the government said if you have someone working for you, you have to pay them for their time. that very quickly turned out to be not as simple as it might have seemed. in the 40's congress came back and said you don't have to pay people for the time they spend getting to the job, or going home from the job. then, another nine years after that in the 1950's, the supreme court says what does that mean? if you come in, and you are at work sharpening your knife before you clock in as a pusher -- a butcher, do you have to be paid for that time? the time you spend showering if you work in a battery factory, and you have sulfuric acid underclothes, that should be paid too. that up ton later, 25 minutes you spend waiting in line for security check, is that like the commuting time that you don't get p

joining us, bloomberg contributing editor paul kedrosky, from san diego. paul, are you worried?nd of. i think we will see a whole series of these transitional orders -- quarters for google. they are going to the same transformation as facebook from a few years ago as they go from being a dotcom product to a mobile product. that has penalized them, and it looks like it will continue to. the blend of revenues and growth on mobile platforms don't compare well to what they got on the desktop. that's the problem. as we transition to a more mobile universe, that will hurt them in till the transition succeeds. >> one thing, they don't break out mobile revenue, so we don't know how it is doing versus desktop. >> they sort of speaking euphemisms about it, general ter ms. we see lower cost per click on the mobile platform. we don't know exact what is happening. parties,w from third about a year ago we were still looking at 20% of search advertising coming from mobile. now closer to 35% in the recent period. so these are erratic changes going on in the core of google's business. that's a t

for more on apple's big day, i was joined by joe brown, paul kedrosky, and president of the global design for lunar. take a listen. >> it has become a real -- it is easy to unlock and get things when you are authenticating. security is very important right now, especially to apple. it is a really big deal. faster wi-fi is very good. especially people using laptop replacements. they are thinner. you can stack two of these on top of each other. and it is still thinner than the original ipad. >> how are you feeling? are you still feeling mac? >> i am still a mac. it is what we thought we would see. we are seeing it. i saw on my twitter stream about how they are going on about thin, as if nothing matters. none of it changes the fundamental problem that the purchasing cycle for tablets is much slower than phones. there is been a real loss of momentum. --ing the devices that are thinner is not really going to change all of that. the fundamental problem they have been in that market. what worries me is that all of it reminds me of what cook is good at is optimization. making things thinner. impr

i want to bring in paul kedrosky . knowing's feel entrance in china? tosell out in get into the market? >> we also out. -- all sell out. did you seelell out? >> everyday. [laughter] the exact same risk exists in china. if you do not launch quickly, you have to clone your business and then you are going to get beat up because you have to purchase as an entrenched competitor. in your view, with a have been better off not going to the chinese market? >> i think they had to. i think the difficult part in the business is that there is fundamentally a contradiction in the business. the trouble is that they do not like their business enough. they want people to stay on their site for more hours a day using content. at that point, you run into the censorship problem. the core business of linkedin is not running contrary. >> they wanted to get more and more users. that growth is slowing down. growth rates are slowing down, which is why they are looking at other markets and other segments in the u.s. i want to say another comment einer said they are going for yo

paul kedrosky, thank you for joining us. --ry we will be talking about more orange hair.eal sensation and sunglasses and haunted houses. ♪ >> we have not even trick-or-treat it yet, and walmart already has its eyes on christmas. 20,000 prices on products to get shoppers into stores early. retail for usvers and she has the details. here is what i do not get. not that walmart is ahead of the game, because all of these doors of these stores are, but how are they going to drop prices? they are so cheap now. >> they have negotiating power to some extent with their suppliers. that should allow them to cut to someo stop extent -- extent. but now there will be more of a hit on margins for these guys. amazon is an aggressive discounter, and the margins are not pretty. >> let's be clear, negative margins. here walmarter wants to go? negative margins? if you look at some of the examples, they're discounting hd tv's by $100 if you're looking at a sony 48 inch tv. it is 100 dollars off. a barbie dream house is being discounted by nearly $30. you're seeing these discounts rollout alrea

johnson andre cory paul kedrosky. paul, i will start with you. obviously there continues to be this fascination with what is happening with user growth. is that fair, and is that the number we should be focusing on? >> i think it is fair. i think it is frustrating twitter. call, you from the asked the question about daily growthusers and timeline and all of a sudden there is a sense of, i heard this question too many times. the company is clearly frustrated with the investor fixation with those numbers and wants to tell a different story, but it's the only one that customers understand. stage, theit this company should be growing. we've criticize a lot of companies in silicon valley like the snapchat model, which was once the google model. let's get big and figure out how to make money later. 284 million users is a lot. at the growth rate is lower than it has been. , the growth rate was coming down and coming down in the december quarter, but then it picked up. you want to see that rebound continue. but it did not. it's a disappointment for this

and paul kedrosky. abouthing i want to say this, i'm going to try to keep down, and let you say it/ . >> it is disappointing. i am not completely surprised, him, ort it is j microsoft, but too often the message is that if you put your head down and do your work that you will get noticed and it is not always like that. it is really important that women, minorities, will in general, speak up for themselves. theysk for a raise when feel they need it. we know that the pay gap information for women has been all over the news recently. >> $.75 on the dollar. women still make about three quarters of what men do. the datast this week came out for pay gap on minorities. about $3000 less for blacks, and $15,000 less for hispanics. why any of this should prove true going forward. >> he was being interviewed by a microsoft board member, also a ofan, and president harvey mud college. she disagreed with him. >> this isn't the edges agree with you on. -- this is something i disagree with you on. [applause] this is my

kedrosky. got paul exploringey were talks. now it is happening. what do you make of it? an interesting move now. there is an incredible price war going on. there is a site of the business that is driven by headlines. it has been an incredible death spiral. the whole model they pursue has really fallen apart in the face of the internet base service of malware. this will be a tough one. >> what does this mean for the industry? >> it means a couple of things. on one hand you have two businesses that aren't growing. as one analyst put it, there are two businesses that are not growing. the problem is that symantec had a security system for many years. it was the only thing you needed. antivirus did very well. now you're in a situation where antivirus alone will not catch a lot of anything. they need to adjust that problem parity rapidly. what we have heard is that the split will give them the resources to be able to do that. what we are hearing is that they have been sniffing around the stores division for a wow. i would be surprised to see that division selloff at some point

joining me are cory johnson and paul kedrosky. what do you make of the story? is pretty bad for them. i tried to go through this. i am sensitive to problems of making privacy and anonymity work online, because it is very difficult. based on what we saw in the "guardian" story that came out, there are actual screenshots of this thing. they seem to show the incredible level of detail with respect to tracking people's physical presence. that makes it tricky whenever you say, give the example of some quotes from somebody who seemed to be located somewhere in the white house proximity and said something about how people -- if people only knew what was going on. it is remarkable stuff. >> i was also amazed when it was said there are 2.4 million messages every day on whisper. there is clearly a demand for this service. but to put things up anonymously, is this over for whisper? >> i think it is deal over in a broad sense for a lot of people claiming true anonymity. we saw a little of this with snapchat. the whole notion of being able to protect people's data is up in