Shocking video reveals the “$160 billion tsunami” that could wipe out Microsoft — and hand well-positioned investors untold millions…

But as you’re about to find out, that’s nothing compared to the gains we could see going forward. Which is why I thought you might be interested in an eye-opening video that reveals…

• The dirty secret behind Microsoft’s mind-boggling growth — and the 118-year-old technology that’s about to bring the computing giant to its knees.
• Why even Bill Gates admits that “the next sea change is upon us” – and why one of the world’s most widely-followed investors is convinced this massive shift will make in-the-know investors extremely wealthy.
• Everything you need to claim your fair share of the profits – including the full story behind a handful of little-known companies that are poised to rule the post-Microsoft world.

Click here to watch this video now

My friend asked me a simple question: “Is this anything new?”

I skimmed the transcript that comes up when you try to leave the video page.

Crammed with 21 pages of detailed stock research, Gold and Beyond: 7 Surprise Plays to Inflation-Proof Your Portfolio is the latest in a long line of wildly popular and performance-packed research documents.

Meanwhile, a few hundred miles south, on the banks of the Columbia River, a mysterious outfit known only as “Design LLC” quietly constructed two massive, windowless warehouses. This mammoth undertaking was code-named “Project 2,” and the International Herald Tribune described the towering monolithic structures as “looming like an information-age nuclear plant.”

The story of Google building its data center near hydro power is a couple years old, all the nerds looked at the announcement and went “Hey, yeah, when you have a lot of servers that makes a lot sense. Clever.” Since 2005, power – largely for cooling – has been the key constraint on very large data centers run by Google and a few other very large tech companies run. This is definitely not news, and not related to cloud computing services.

They spooked the Microsoft founder into an early retirement. … And that’s precisely why the two words “cloud computing” scare the hell out of Bill Gates. You see, he realizes that thanks to the thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable laid during the late 1990s, the speed of computer networks has finally caught up to the speed of computer processors.

The invocation of Bill Gates is a big red flag that this is targeted to unsavvy investors. He hasn’t been involved in the day-to-day of Microsoft since 2006, not in R&D since 2008. While this plays on the fact that the public associates him with Microsoft and will for a few decades, he spends his time on philanthropy. The author thinks you’re an idiot.

But cloud computing isn’t going to be just a modern convenience — it’s going to be an enormous industry. You see, everyone from individuals to multinational corporations can now simply tap into the “cloud” to get all the things they used to have to supply and maintain themselves. This will save some companies millions and make others billions.

Cloud computing is when a developer rents computer time from other people’s data centers. You likely already use many services that use cloud computing but you don’t directly use it, it’s infrastructure. It’s really only annoying to Microsoft because these servers almost always run some variant of Linux or Unix rather than Windows, but that’s a missed opportunity rather than anything that’s going to actually take money out of Microsoft’s pockets by hurting their sales of desktop software. It is not “the next big thing”, though it is perhaps still the current big thing. It’s been in use for several years; I used it at the Post to process an 17,481 page PDF in a couple hours instead of two weeks.

That’s why I’m so eager to tell you all about the three companies that are leading the charge and look poised to rule the post-Microsoft world. … It all starts with taking us up on this special offer and claiming your FREE report: The 3 Kings of Cloud Computing. I want you to have it right now, with my compliments. And here’s one more thing I’d like you to accept with my compliments: an invitation to join our Rule Breakers community absolutely without any risk.

If you want to put your money behind cloud computing, buy Amazon. They sell what is by far the best cloud computing platform and will be for the next few years. Yes, the retailer. They built an incredibly smart backend to Amazon.com, then built good developer tools on top of it and started selling access in 2006. The company in second place is Rackspace, one of the biggest and best Internet hosting companies in the world, who bought a cloud computing company to expand their offerings. They have decent products, but Amazon is simply doing a better job.

Isn’t it too late to buy Google?

Not at all! In fact, as I mentioned, one of America’s most trusted stock pickers is convinced that right now is the perfect time to get invested in the future of cloud computing — and especially in Google.

It is a non-sequiter to suggest buying Google based on cloud computing. Google does sell a little bit in the form of Google App Engine, but even without looking at their FEC filings I’d guess it accounts for <1% of their revenues and they're not heavily promoting it. Google is still an advertising company.

It is not a bad idea to consider buying Microsoft based on cloud computing, despite the screaming hype of this sales letter. Earlier this year Ballmer said they’re going “all in” on providing cloud computing services. Nobody knows quite what that will look like (and MS has a three-decade history of pre-announcing projects to try to scare away competitors), but they have enough developers using their services that they whatever they eventually produce is at least unlikely to flop.

But why should you trust him? … Here are just a few more of the top dogs and first movers he’s uncovered recently:

• Myriad Genetics — Locked in 225% gains
• Baidu — Up 1,251%
• Vertex Pharmaceuticals — Up 259%
• Green Mountain Coffee Roasters — Up 260%
• MercadoLibre — Up 340%

I can even duplicate his prediction feat: on the NYSE, I recommend you buy every stock whose ticker symbol starts with a vowel. Come back in a year and I’ll point out the half-dozen that have skyrocketed.

In closing, always ask yourself why anyone would be stupid enough to sell this information. If he seriously thought that just buying a stock would get a three-digit return, he would be selling his house and kids and borrowing from loan sharks to buy before the market moves, and then building a large, Scrooge McDuck-style vault so he can swim around in his acres of money. Not selling PDFs by monthly subscription.

When I had one day’s notice that Hillary Clinton was going to release her schedule from the time she was first lady, I thought it entirely possible we’d have to scan it, or work with a scanned copy. So I signed up for an Amazon Web Services account in case I needed to rent some computing time via EC2 to process all the images.

There’s one catch, though, new Amazon users were limited to running only 10 (now 20) instances at a time. I sent an email requesting the limit be raised, but there were two snags. First, their billing system didn’t allow them to up the limit until I’d initialized my account by running one (thus using it, even a little). A techie emailed me to tell me this, but every time I tried to run one I got an error message.

The second snag: I’d screwed up the expiration date on my credit card (got a new card in the mail the day before, gave that expiration and hadn’t called to activate it yet). So, at 8:15 PM on a Tuesday night, that techie called me, conferenced in someone from Billing who corrected the error and ran a test transaction to make sure my card would work, then stayed on the line for me to spin up an instance so he could raise my limit.

It was great customer service, especially as I ended up needing to use those instances to process Clinton’s schedule.

Two

A week ago I was writing about refactoring and linked the Amazon pages on my two favorite books. While I was at it, I signed up for their affiliate program and researched how to tag those links. Even after reading through their documentation, I could not figure out how.

They provide a Fancy Link Builder so you can make fancy image links, but I only wanted an unobtrusive plain text link. The Link Builder doesn’t do that: the option for spitting out text links still includes a 1×1 image, and the links include dozens of GET variables — anything but plain. I knew I’d seen short Amazon links on other sites, so I contacted support asking for help fixing my failed attempt.

I got back a form latter informing me what I’d told them, that my attempts didn’t work. It also said I should use the Fancy Link Builder that I’d said didn’t work for my purposes.

I replied and asked how to create a link without GET variables, and I got back a form letter telling me to add a GET variable with my tracking ID.

I replied and asked again and got a form letter with detailed (but out-of-date) instructions on how to use the Fancy Link Builder… to produce a “text-only” link that included an image and GET variables.

I replied to ask again and mention they should update their previous form letter. I got a form letter that insisted none of these were form letters, which I guess means whoever wrote the fourth form letter thought it would be better to try to convince me their customer service personnel typed long, detailed (and once, oudated) messages to my specific question that evinced a lack of comprehension. (Then it suggested I should probably just go post on the affiliate board.)

I did what I should have done a few rounds before and went to find examples of affiliate links. After some tinkering and testing, I figured out how to build the links (add /trackingid-20/ref=nosim/ to the end).

Reflection

I was a bit surprised by the stark difference between the two customer service interactions, but I realize two different departments at a large company can easily be that different.

And then a difference occurred to me. I went back to look up my emails with the EC2 techie: turns out he wasn’t a techie, his title was Business Development Manager. I guess someone saw the @washingtonpost.com on the end of my email address. There certainly aren’t any case studies on Peter Harkins successfully linking to two refactoring books.

As bad experiences go, the affiliate linking was pretty mild and doesn’t bother me at all. It was a weird request, most of their affiliates are nontechnical and don’t fuss about URL aesthetics, and the image links probably peform better.

The EC2 interaction was great at the time but bothers me now. I hate special clubs and privileges, and that’s pretty clearly what I got. (Though it’s possible some Amazon employee with a title like “Community Outreach Supporter” will notice this post and come explain that every new customer gets after-hours handholding from a manager who conference-calls in a domain expert. Um, sure.) I realize here that I’m complaining about customer service being unfair in my favor, but I can’t help but think it’s wrong.

A few months ago I bought from Amazon Merchants for the first time, getting three things from three different merchants. Everything arrived fine and within the same two days, so I went to leave feedback for all of them. They were all small, easily shipped, reasonably-priced, and they arrived fine, so I just gave them all three stars and got on with my day.

Within the next few days, all three vendors contacted me and asked me to remove my “negative” feedback. Well, not so much negative as “average” when I could have chosen “superb”. One looked like a form letter. All of them offered to refund my shipping if I’d delete my rating to stop pulling down their average rating.

It sounds like Amazon Merchants believe that even the smallest amount of feedback that’s not a 5-star rating hurts them significantly. I don’t know if that’s correct, if they’ll be explicitly punished by Amazon or just don’t want to risk having a lower total rating than their competitors, but they would all pay to remove my imperfect ratings. (I didn’t mean to harm them, so I just pulled the reviews without getting refunds.)

Perhaps it’s just chance that all four vendors offered to refund shipping to remove less-than-glowing reviews, but I have to wonder if Amazon’s feedback system is too strict. Buyers won’t see real negative feedback because Merchants are paying to have it removed. If Merchants can’t shrug off a few reviews now and then, unscrupulous buyers could leave negative feedback to bully Merchants into giving discounts after the sale.