Slashdot Mirror
Ballmer, Gates on Microsoft's Future
RoadFever writes: "At the Microsoft shareholders meeting, CEO Ballmer acknowledged they may have a popularity bug. "We understand, based upon the fact that our industry didn't rally to support us, that we need to change the way we interact and relate to our industry," Ballmer said.
There's a summary article in the Seattle Times and more stuff on the Microsoft investor relations page.
Will words translate to action? Well, the company might want to start by toning down the habit of taking credit for every innovation: "Really, the reason you see open source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that's identical with millions and millions of machines," Gates said." The question-and-answer session near the end of the meeting has the most juicy quotes.
Blatant whoring link here for both of the videos.
I take no responsibility for any emotional damage you suffer from these videos.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
They bought it from the guy who did. If Microsoft hadn't existed, IBM would have bought it directly from Gary Kildall, or used the real deal (CP/M, which was what DOS was inspired by), or any of a number of other operating systems that were easily available in the 1980 time frame.
All Microsoft did was the same thing they always did... sold something that someone else invented after sticking their name on it.
Did I not read on this site that M$ paid no federal taxes last year? Maybe Bill could help out Uncle Sam a little and pay his fair share..or under a Republican administration is his fair share zero!!!!
I want to be alone with the sandwich
I don't know where Gates gets his figures, but Google tells me that Canada is up there with South Korea with penetrations of around 40-50%. This neat page of summary stats shows Denmark and Sweden at around 14% and I suspect many Scandinavian and other European countries are on par with the US's 11% broadband penetration rate. Sounds to me like the US is fighting for fifth at best. Articles at Newsbytes, and Broadband week both refer to a study by eMarketer that seems to says similar things.
An older report by the Strategis Group referred to in this CNN article names Australia, Canada, The Netherlands, Singapore, and Sweden as likely to lead broadband penetration.
Mozilla
Neither. But Gore had a lot more to do with it's growth and development than Gates did.
In the 80s, as a Senator, Gore at least knew what the Internet was...and helped provide funding to the NSF that helped speed up its development.
Bill Gates didn't even know the Internet existed until 1995.
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
I'm not much of a code jockey, but I know a bit about finance, having worked as an investment banker and venture capitalist.
1. Paying a dividend is not required by the IRS, the SEC or any federal law, as far as I know.
2. Paying a dividend exposes your money to double taxation: the standard corporate rate (paid at the time the profit was earned), and then your personal tax rate (including city, state, and federal). This is money out of your pocket as much as Bill's.
3. Whether Bill Gates ownes 25% of MSFT is irrelevant to the decision to pay a dividend. If I own one share, I'd rather receive the full value of my 1/# shares ownership of Microsoft's cash assets, rather than shave off an additional percentage to go to the government. Paying more taxes is not in the interest of Microsoft's shareholders, no matter how large their holdings. If anything, more stock held by management is a good thing--it aligns the incentives of the managers with the incentives of the stockholders. In a company where the management owns very little of the shares, you are far more likely to see decisions made that sell out shareholders (the owners) to the benefit of the current management (with foolhardy acquisitions, for example). This is a classic problem in economics, and it's why you rarely see small, owner-managed companies being as stupid with their money as large companies often are.
4. If Microsoft can't find profitable uses for the cash, it should buy back its stock. That, as one poster wisely pointed out, will increase the value of each share, as the same pie is divided by a smaller number of shares. Besides, the value of the cash on hand increases the book value of a single share of Microsoft--in other words, each share of ownership now entitles you to your proportional share of each additional dollar in MSFT's bank account, a gain in value that cost you nothing.
5. For most stockholders, the capital gains tax rate is lower (often far lower) than the personal income tax rate. As a result, you'd rather get paid back for your investment in Microsoft in stock price appreciation than tax-affected cash.
6. People buy equities (shares of stock) because they represent a future stream of cash flows generated from a business. In this way, buying the stock of a business is no different than buying a bond: both represent a stream of future payments, and the price you pay now depends on the magnitude, frequency, and likelihood of those payments. Thus, buying the stock of a company that doesn't pay dividends is like buying a zero-coupon bond (a bond that doesn't pay periodic interest, but that reaches full face value at maturity). The net result is that market adjusts the price you paid for the stock or bond to account for the nature of the payouts. Instead of valuing the stream of cash payments you receive in the form of dividends, you value the discounted cash flows that Microsoft retains.
But Microsoft shouldn't just sock away money in a money market account. If it can't find opportunities that offer a greater rate of return than a money market account or bonds (both vehicles which are available to individual stockholders as well), then it should buy back stock. (Technically, the rate-of-return hurdle for new lines of business or new acquisitions should be Microsoft's cost of capital, the rate at which it can "borrow" money from the capital markets.)
I hope that helps.
BS. He was on the minis and didn't he clone a public domain BASIC interpreter?
More to the point, he was out to make money, so why would he give a rat's ass about open source software.