Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Apps currently constitutes less than 1% of the $643 Trefis price estimate for Google’s stock. Google competes with Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and others in the web-based productivity software market.

Google Apps includes e-mail, calendar, word processing, spreadsheet and collaboration programs. Although the Google Apps user base has grown in the last few years, the overwhelming majority of users don’t pay for the service. We estimate that only 6% of Google Apps users are actually paid users, while the rest use the free version.

Kevin Landis is one of the well known Portfolio Managers still around from the dot com error. He was well respected in the investment world up until the crash. His funds also highlight the issues with being a sector driven PM. Nice when your sector is soaring but horrible when the boom turns to bust.

Barron's did a nice write up on him and his funds. Lately Landis has put up some impressive results and based on history it's worth reviewing his picks. He is well known for investing in leading edge technologies. Unfortunately, if you aren't careful such investments can quickly turn into a bleeding edge. Those investments tend to bleed you dry before paying out.The combination of the valuations in some tech stocks and the fact that he is starting to get press makes me wonder about a topping action in tech. Unlikely yet, but worth watching.

Vistaprint's (VPRT) shares collapsed after the company reported fiscal 4Q earnings and forward guidance that reflected accelerated spending, internal execution issues, currency impacts, and economic pressures on small businesses.

Management placed emphasis on the internal execution and operational issues as the culprit for the missed expectations. Specifically, rapid hiring, with those hires left untrained, and marketing initiatives that had unintended negative consequences, led the company to issue guidance below the Street. Several analysts downgraded the shares following the report, wrongly in our view.

The day of reckoning for Web 2.0 companies is approaching just as surely as it did for Web 1.0. We appear to be about a decade behind Web 1.0, which would suggest that the crash could start next spring.

Not all Web 2.0 companies will fail, just as not all Web 1.0 companies failed: Amazon (AMZN) and Google (GOOG) seem to be doing just fine, and the eventual Facebook IPO will graduate it into this camp as well.

The old tech bellwethers of the 1990s failed to meet the unrealistic expectations investors had of them. The stocks have fared poorly since the market peaked in 2000, but revenues and earnings have generally grown reasonably well. The result is that these stocks, so overpriced a decade ago, can now be considered value stocks. In addition to having low P/E ratios and decent growth, most of these companies have strong balance sheets with plenty of cash.

There is now a new crop of tech favorites. Many of them are expected to profit from the rise of “cloud” computing, and no doubt some of them will. But the lesson from a decade ago is that the big winners are hard to spot ahead of time and if they are all priced for perfection, the safest bet is probably to stay away from them altogether, or perhaps even take positions against them.