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Microsoft To Buy Back $40bn of Its Shares
phantomflanflinger writes "As you may have heard already, Microsoft have announced their intentions to buy back $40 billion in stock from their investors, in the biggest single buy-back plan in business history.
The announcement has given Microsoft shares a small gain but they still stand significantly below their level in January — before Microsoft's unsolicited bid for Yahoo!. The announcement of the plan has also created new speculation about a now-or-never deal with Yahoo!."
...a mac. right now.
Isn't that almost all of their spare cash?
the couldn't but yahoo, so they had to do something with all that money
tho they should have done this earlier, good thing the yahoo deal collapsed, it would have been a bad idea
Why not spend $40bn on other stock.
Doesn't make sense to me, come on you stockmarket guys, explain the rationale.
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
Can we vote on this?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Microsoft has made a lot of money off of OS and office products but hasn't been equally successful with the side ventures. Vista has been such a tremendous flop, I wonder what their internal projections are looking like for the next five years. I think it's arguable to say that the advances they've made in other segments stem directly from their control of the desktop. If they lose the desktop battle, will their products remain compelling enough to hold onto the beachheads in the server room, in the development shops? I doubt they'll dry up and blow away overnight but it looks like there's a serious possibility of a reduced relevance in the future.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Or would you?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This is probably better than losing the whole pile bit by bit to enterprising attorneys and their clever lawsuits AND with the markets being so depressed right now and the number of good alternative investments diminished it probably does make sense to recapture some of those outstanding shares while the price is still attractive.
What does it mean when a publicly traded company buy's its own stock?
That doesn't make sense to me. Don't the stock owners own the company? What does it mean when you own shares of a company that owns shares of its company. Isn't it redundant?
Disclaimer: I got A's in all my CS classes and B's and C's in my Economics / Business classes.
I think Microsoft should buy up all the mortgage-backed securities it can get its hands on.
That way I won't be forced to buy them (with my taxes).
The truth is an offense, but not a sin.------R. N. Marley
All this means is that debt is a cheaper and more risk-averse way for them to finance their crappy commercials and world takeover plans. In this market, you can see billions in capital evaporate in minutes. Not to side with Microsoft, but it was a good move as the market is about to take a dump.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I am happy they are doing this. I wish they would buy back more stock instead of crapping around with Yahoo, and conducting R&D that they will never commercialize. Also they raised the dividend from its current crappy l1 cents to 13 cents which is still crappy. They should raise it to at least 40 cents.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Mark cuban recently wrote a post about the correlation between shares Buyback and Collapse of Financial powerhouse like AIG-Lehman and ML . I hope MSFT can avoid that fate. http://blogmaverick.com/2008/09/16/the-aig-lehman-merrill-lynch-link/
somethings are best left unsaid , I am one of those things
Composite government funds own 82% of Microsoft according to this website.
This file shows that the New York retirement investment fund had over $1,000,000,000 in MS stock in 2006.
Add up every other state, county and city that owns Microsoft stock and it could really pile up.
Could it be that our own Government over the last several decades has been promoting to those fortune 500 companies, of which Government owns most through Bond - Loan investment / stock ownership [EXAMPLES: 82% stock ownership of Microsoft Corporation, Disney 61%, AOL - Time Warner 58%, EXXON 72%] to manufacture abroad so that Government would realize greater returns on their investments at the Peoples of the USA's expense in jobs and wealth retention.
-cafr1.com
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
I know this is a really new and novel idea for tech companies but there used to be this method that stocks had to put money directly into the hands of the shareholders. I think they called it a dividend or something. Now I know that no tech company has ever issued a dividend but maybe they can think of starting such a practice? Make it small like 2-3 cents per share and see how it goes. It's likely to be way more profitable for the shareholders then a stock repurchasing plan.
1. Buy $40B worth of stock
2. Wait for it to grow
3. Sell it for profit
4. Ruin AAPL/GOOG share price by a sudden influx of stock.
5. Lather, rinse, repeat. You also get voting rights as a major shareholder.
It's now or never,
our bid is right.
Yahoo, you're sinking
'neath Google's might.
We're desperate and it's geeeeeetting late.
Icahn's our puppet and this chaaaaaaaaair won't wait.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVMy0PFr8no
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
WTF did they sit on the cash for so long?
Ny captcha is "stupid". How fitting.
Or Bear Stearns. Or Lehman Brothers.
Generate some good press & goodwill with the American people.
Buybacks are more tax efficient. US shareholders would each be taxed at the dividend income rate for the dividend payment. By doing a buyback, shareholders who would have preferred a dividend can sell a portion of their shares, simulating a dividend, and then only paying the capital gains tax, which is typically lower than the tax for ordinary income or dividends.
Consider this move in the context of the financial system meltdown, with US Treasury bonds at 40 & 50-year lows.
The *officially stated* purpose of this action is boosting MS share values. But they are almost completely going to deplete their entire cash reserve to buy back shares. From now on, they'll use debt -- bonds -- to finance expansion and development.
They're bond rating is "AAA", which only 5 or 6 other companies and the government have.
What's interesting is that with lending seized-up around the world, we know that money creation is basically halted. So, I wonder if there wasn't a little pressure on Microsoft to convert to a debt-financed operation & flood the market with new, high-quality debt, thus creating new money.
in the last 15 years, Microsoft has lost over $10 billion on Windows CE/PocketPC/Windows Mobile alone. The Xbox venture is probably already around $20 billion and yes, they've lost billions on everything outside of their ability to leverage the desktop OS monopoly. IMO
I figure this is more to keep executives happy and employees happy as they have already seen 30% of their retirement vaporize this year alone.
As far as Vista goes, it is forced onto OEM PCs so they get paid just like they did when Windows XP was preloaded. They might have changed the payment some because of different version packages but it's preload $$$ that keep flowing to their banks and only OEMs going away from Windows is going to slow that down. That's taking a while but gaining momentum every day.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I have an answer I can understand.
However, $40bn is an awful lot of moolah, couldn't they improve shareholder value in some other more productive, or revenue generating way?
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
"Vista has been such a tremendous flop"
Do you have any idea what an idiot making such an inane assertion makes you look like?
And how much of this will come directly from Bill Gates, who has nominally been selling a million shares a month for seemingly forever now?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Or you can buy 600000000 pair of The Conquistador shoes at the Shoe Circus
Every time you call tech support, a little kitten dies.
As opposed to the trillions of dollars vanishing in the stock market?
Now then, if Microsoft could just buy all of HP's stock, then they'd be just like Apple with their own hardware platform...no, wait...on second thought...
Skilled in differentiating ravens from a writing desks.
This sends a very clear message to Yahoo: Let us buy you, or we will buy ourselves instead!
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Once I read an insightful article that pointed out how a stock buyback is the sign of a dying company.
Why would it be that, you ask?
Because a company who can't find a better place to invest their cash in expanding themselves into new areas (as opposed to merely buying back their stock) clearly has no vision or wish to be anything more than they already are.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
And we should trust you on your opinion about 'm$' because... you post things like these and have like 20 accounts. Right?
I see you have an active journal and write mostly about all the supposed bad things happening with Microsoft. Did you perchance write a long JE about how they turned a record profit last fiscal year? No, you probably only wrote one about how their revenue declined %20 in one quarter. It's always fun to look at the small picture when it suits you, isn't it?
I'm not even going to bother explaining how the stock market works here. I have a feeling it would do no good whatsoever.
I don't particularly like or dislike Microsoft. I use some of their products, and they are OK sometimes. But people like you are really weird.
See pathetic loser. If you can at least READ the commentary right above yours you will see that IT IS A GOOD THING for M$, and is happening because they have WAY TOO MUCH MONEY they cannot spend it anymore, so they buy stock to increase share value.
But pathetic morons that used to get beaten and have their lunch stolen at school can't understand that because they are locked at their mom's basements living on an oblivion of Linux and WoW.
Now we see the REAL reason why the government failed to follow through on the punishment phase of MS's antitrust/monopoly furtherance conviction.
Hell, in light of that one, even the most liberal left winger would suspend MS's punishment and spin up a story to cover that one.
Parent post is at best hard to parse and at worst nonsense, and I don't like modding posts overrated. I have studied public finance extensively, and I also manage investments.
You improve your P/E ratio, ultimately meaning that your dividends get spread across a smaller pool of stocks...
PE is the ratio of Price (per share) to Earnings (per share). Any change in PE is incidental here, and is the result of the reduction in the denominator of EPS (Earnings Per Share). In fact, you might expect the PE ratio to stay the same, with the price moving commensurate to the reduction in shares and increase in EPS. When you say "stocks", you are referring to the stock of more than one company. You meant shares, which represent stock in a company. I'm not trying to be pedantic, but using the right terminology helps.
When a company has excess cash, one of the things it can do is to buy back shares from shareholders who wish to sell shares. Doing this reduces the shares outstanding and therefore increases the ownership stakes of those shareholders who decide not to sell. Some shareholders might also use it as a tax-efficient dividend (at the capital gains rate), by selling a small fraction of their shareholding.
makes the stocks more valuable as a blue chip commodity, raising their price. its a good strategy when you're taking a long view, and don't anticipate any future rapid growth.
Being a blue chip company has more to do with having stable earnings and a clean balance sheet. Blue chip companies are the companies of conservative investors, "widows and orphans", and this has little to do with buying back shares, except that it is a way to approximate a dividend.
The $40b is controlled by the board of directors, and ultimately belongs to the shareholders. its not a funny money fund. Ultimately the best use of the $ is to improve the shareholder's value.
Parse error.
1) Devalue your stock with pointless bidding war with Yahoo!
2) Buy your own undervalued stock
3) ???^H^H^H^H^H^H
4) Profit!
Anyone can "stand up for what they believe", but it takes a very brave individual to change what they believe. - Loundry
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The link as provided above seems to get stuck in a microsoft passport redirector for me. That might be because I'm super-paranoid and I've disabled cookies, referrer ID, and lots of javascript, but it's certainly a tracking link that pushes through Microsoft's servers for that exclusive reason.
You're better off clicking on http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_10532858?source=most_viewed instead.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I thought it said:
Microsoft To Buy Back $40bn of Its Servers
Ah well, we can but dream.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Those little beaks are sharp.
Are you trying to tell people that M$ did not have $60 billion three years ago and that they are not about to go into debt? Or are you trying to tell me that's a good thing? You claim to know how the stock market really works, do enlighten us about how a complete loss of money and confidence can be good for M$.
Stalkers like you make twitter look sane and rational.
Vista is at best merely this years version of Windows.
It's the continuation of a monopoly that's been in place since MS-DOS.
You're gushing over being able to run Vista well on a machine that's
priced the same as a Mac. That's really sad. Vista has singlehandedly
wiped out the last vestige of the PC price advantage.
If more regular consumers get over this "gotta be DOS compatable man"
fixation then things will get REALLY interesting.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
This is entirely off topic, but is your sig seriously a knick knack paddy wack/Dune combo? Mod me down all you want, but for the love of all that is holy please please someone stab him in the eye!
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
something big comes up and makes oses and/or office programs unnecessary and microsoft happens to have spent the cash in 'increasing wealth of its shareholders' to invest in it timely ?
with what will it increase its shareholders' wealth then ?
Read radical news here
What the fuck are you babbling about?
"You're gushing over being able to run Vista well on a machine that's
priced the same as a Mac"
WTF??? Go get mommy to read it to you slowly and explain it to you slowly...
Hint: PC price Mac price
whose stock ISN'T below where they were in January? dumbasses.
.
Top Operating System Share Trend
October 07
Vista 8%
OSX 6%
Linux 0.5%
August 08
Vista 18%
OSX 8%
Linux 0.9%
Net Applications tracks users on the web not corporate licenses.
OEM Vista is almost exclusively Vista Premium with 64bit Vista becoming increasing visible even at Walmart. HP Pavililion
This is a real intrusion on territory claimed by the Mac.
whereas IIS servers generally serve single websites, linux webservers are generally run by shared web hosting companies, giving out close to 300 websites (in separate accounts) from each box.
that is the way it is in the datacenter farms that are crammed with boxes these days. (especially theplanet.com is biggest, but there are many).
there is no server beachhead for microsoft. what generally happens is that, when an already locked in small business running microsoft products realizes that they need a web site and they can host it, they just put up a box with IIS in-house, serving internet. voila - another IIS server added to microsoft's growing list of servers using IIS. how many websites does that box host ? one.
Read radical news here
The fantasy you think you are living is retarded.
you bought a screaming computer from newegg, loaded vista on it, and its screaming, right ?
wake up call - if you have loaded xp on it, it would have taken you to the stars. thats how vista falls back in system performance behind xp.
no surprise though, you are a former mac user. you dont know anything about how versatile and powerful pc platform is, and 'just working' is something that is not accepted as the norm in pc world. if something 'just works' it means it can probably do more.
welcome to the world of pc.
Read radical news here
I call bullshit. I have never met anyone who switched from Mac to Vista and was happy about it, least of all anyone on slashdot.
I too buy cheap 500-600 machines to run windows on. But like any smart person, I put XP on it, and use it to play video games, not for any real work.
you should have read the other commentaries on how it is bad, before ranting away.
Read radical news here
"You're gushing over being able to run Vista well on a machine that's
priced the same as a Mac."
No he wasn't.
Apart from the crippled Mac mini which barely meets the price point at $599, which Mac can you get for "5 or 600 bucks"?
No, I'm not going to accept the Mac mini, so don't bother unless you find one that is feature comparable to a 600 dollar tower, including expansion slots.
To quote LongNoi "QZTR was right and won't leave me alone because I called him a moron when I was wrong" FYS
Why doesn't MS just do the Wall Street Bailout and save us tax payers. Then it would be MS-USA.
... Why was this modded insightful, exactly?
"lol everybody who hates windows just runs a mac"
Yeah, like the fact that linux distros continue to outdo MS for new features, and are the ones MS is playing catch-up to... This totally makes vista great! Check out win+tab! Zomg! Too bad compiz did this years ago. Too bad xcompmgr did hardware compositing ohso long ago. Zomg! Cancel/Allow! Too bad sudo was pretty much created by linux users.
Delusional? I think somebody saying they are in love with a company is delusional. How is this different than somebody telling you Procter & Gamble are such a great company?
That's what the headline should have been.
(I'd write the story myself but Fake News Nightly got there first.)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Sigh.. I am so sick of Microsoft news... why don't they donate a lot of that money and help our economy or donate to help bring the gas prices down if they REALLY want to make some worthwhile news. Now, THAT would be attention grabbing and worth reading.
When I bought it, it was doubling and splitting regularly
Yes... well those splits definitely destroy value. Roughly 2% per split goes to the financial firm doing the split. Buy-backs are also a bit of a value destructor too so don't bank on it.
I'd like to see it earn its keep again for a while before I sell it.
Common sense should tell you that Microsoft's days of being a growth stock are well behind it. Do not stay married to the stock. If it is not performing *today*, sell it and buy one that you think has a better future. I would recommend some kind of ETF over individual stocks though. Playing the stock market as an average individual is a fools game.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
it is such fun to come and watch fools like you sit around in open source/Linux/Mac user population heavy sites
Yeah, you're here too, dickhead.
This is entirely off topic, but is your sig seriously a knick knack paddy wack/Dune combo? Mod me down all you want, but for the love of all that is holy please please someone stab him in the eye!
Yes, yes it is. You no likey? The last one was Blacksploitation Greek theater.
Hey, I hear that Cat Oedipus is one bad mother--
Shut your mouth!
But I'm just talkin' 'bout Oedipus!
Then we can dig it!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I second that. I have not seen any migration from Mac to Windows; rather the opposite. In fact the last technically literate person I knew still using Windows switched a few months back; I now know literally no-one I consider technically knowledgable who uses Windows as their primary machine.
Gaming machines are a different matter, I know a couple of people who keep them around. Games remain the only good reason to run Windows, now more than ever.
Not that I'm a fan of Apple mind you. They're as evil as MS, just more competent (and with better taste). Still, for now, the apps keep my tied to one of the big two, and OSX is a no-brainer.
Which reminds me - fuck Mono. When is someone gonna port Cocoa to linux? ; )
> Stalkers like you make twitter look sane and rational.
This is absolutely pants, considering pretty much everyone knows who
posted the comment to begin with.
You never cease to amuse.
If more regular consumers get over this "gotta be DOS compatable man" fixation then things will get REALLY interesting.
Consumers don't have a fixation with DOS compatibility. Their fixation is with being able to run all the obscure applications they've become accustomed to, and have working stable drivers for all their hardware. If all the apps they want to run are available for another OS, they're free to switch. If there is a suitable alternative available, they're free to switch. If they don't think one of these is true, then they'll stay until they have a compelling reason to investigate and try to determine whether they can switch.
Note that this investigation may be beyond the user's ability - if they don't understand that Internet Explorer is a web browser, they can't very well determine whether Safari would be a suitable replacement.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
on second thought is right. Even if Microsoft had HP's hardware they would still be missing a clue along with any ability to do even moderately good design work.
I really would love to see Microsoft purchase one of the big hardware vendors. It would be their end because every other hardware vendor would start dropping Windows like a piece of shattered glass.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Step #1 Sell off a lot of MSFT shares on news that a new Windows operating system will be released in a few years. It drives the price up and makes Microsoft a lot of money.
Step #2 Make sure that Windows Vista bombs and has lots of bugs and incompatibilities with legacy software and hardware.
Step #3 Phase out all older versions of Windows except Windows XP. Sell as many copies of XP as you can from wharehouses. Raise $40 billion in XP sales.
Step #4 After making billions off record XP sales, stop selling XP and release a service pack for Vista that has more bugs than ever.
Step #5 Watch as software reviewers give Windows Vista the worst reviews ever.
Step #6 Announce a Windows 7.0 that will fix Vista issues in a few years.
Step #7 Laugh at all of the bad reviews of Vista and Windows 7.0, but wait for the economy to take a dive due to all the issues that Vista has caused.
Step #8 Right as the US and world economy goes into a recession and buy back $40 billion of MSFT stock at firesale prices with a weak US Dollar and low MSFT price.
Step #9 Wait a few years for the economies to get better and ready to release Windows 7.0 and then sell those MSFT shares at record prices.
Step #10 Repeat the whole process with Windows 7.0 and laugh all the way to the bank.
Bill Gates borrowed from Mel Brooks that one can make more money from a flop than from a hit. :)
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
You know there is a special place in hell reserved for you right? :)
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Saying the dollars are "vanishing" is kinda stupid...
I can claim the plate I hold is worth $1 trillion dollars *crash* oh no!! $1 trillion dollars just disappeared!!
Why doesn't MS just do the Wall Street Bailout and save us tax payers. Then it would be MS-USA.
Because Microsoft isn't an investment bank. And that's a good thing with Wall Street going down the tubes.
Doesn't make sense to me, come on you stockmarket guys, explain the rationale.
Microsoft has expertise in software not the stockmarket. Now if they want to Bill and Steve could hire financial experts and start their own investment bank but that's not MS's strength.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Much of you say may be true but Microsoft is still growing.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Man-boobs and no milk.
i can tell you, as a shared host, windows hosting is SO low in demand that many shared hosts do not offer it.
1and1 is the most disastrous and infamous host in the business btw, from the reviews and horror stories, and what i experienced first hand trying to bail out clients from there. avoid like a plague.
Read radical news here
and make dividends taxable as ordinary income at >30%. A more efficient way to return their profits to shareholders will be through increased share prices, taxed as long-term capital gains whose tax rates will not increase as sharply.
Bah! What am I saying? Everyone knows that changing laws about taxation doesn't affect anyone's behavior....right?
You know there is a special place in hell reserved for you right? :)
I'm not so sure. The place is so popular, it's hard to get reservations.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
MicroSoft has had four winners over its history- languages, DOS, Windows, and Office- but no home runs in the last decade.
Google has had one big winner- its ad program. GMail-WebOffice is poised to make money. Video(UTube) ahs been a huge capital sink so far.
Maybe Bill wants to diversify out of the US Dollar
Your reasoning is not disciplined.
Over an extended period stock splits increase market value. Say X's stock sells for $100 then does a 2 for 1 split. Within months the sales price may be $60, a $20 increase.
you are concatenating two separate events.
Event 1: Stock spilt. This is designed to lower the price of the stock so it is traded more. The only benefits are passed to the brokerage industry in the form of generating more trading fees. Period. There is financial management fees that the company in question typically spends to perform the split. That's where there is a loss of 2%.
Event 2: Stock price rises. This happens because investors feel the future of the company is great. NEVER assume one goes hand-in-hand with the other.
Sure, if you only care for growth sell the stocks.
The grandparent made clear their desires included watching the value of the stock rise. I think you would agree it won't in the near future. Don't spin this off into a different direction as a way to discredit my statements.
Buy-backs are an attempt....
The entirety of your opinions are riddled with exceptions, half-truths and common sensical ideas that have no basis in reality. You need a far deeper understanding of the structure of corporations and corporate charters and far more detailed understanding of publicly traded assets.
Please, take this as an opportunity to learn more rather than some kind of hostile post.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
You do realize that on this scale a flop is STILL Bigger than anything else out there?
Linux - 0.93%
Macs - 7.86% (Includes both intel and older power PC)
Vista - 17.85%
XP - 69.49%
2000 - 1.93%
the only reason they consider it a flop is because it didn't completely replace XP as fast as they wanted. And these are OSes the computers are RUNNING, not nessasairly what they were sold with so OEM doesn't count unless its still running OEM.
AC, there are dozens around me who have purchased new computers in the last 1.5 years and are running Vista because that is what the computer came with.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that OEM preloads has little to do with Vista uptake. Just like the first 3 years of XP and Win2K before it, the preload market is what drives new Microsoft APIs into the hands of willing purchasers.
Besides, WTF is the AC bringing up "flop" for when nobody else even mentioned it. Talking about a flop, why would Microsoft spend so much time on a new OS and not make it modular? I mean they come out with a new OS almost 2 years ago, put over 5 years into, and they have to bring Windows XP back from the dead to shop on these little laptops everyone is craving for? Even then, the Windows versions usually require 2x the system RAM and 2x the HD storage a Linux system requries and often times the Linux distro is packed with software. THAT my AC friend, is a flop IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
...the latest in a long line of Twitter sockpuppet's... symbolset
Please for the love of honesty and truth: send this sockpuppet into the flames of karma hell
http://slashdot.org/~symbolset
Thank you
It can be argued that M$ did not survive the dot com crash
The fact that they still exist in some sort of capacitay at all says you are wrong there. Even Sun Microsystems who suffered greatly in the dot com crash survived it.
Their stock price has been flat over 10 years and they have blown through $60 billion in cash over the last three
The rate at which their profits are increasing is slowing but it is still churning mega profits.
All of their new products have been financial failures
You are about a year late, the Xbox 360 has actually broken that curse and now the Xbox platform is now profitable.
Essentially, they are worth less than half what they were worth ten years ago and are about to take on debt.
Look at their net worth and tell me that again with a straight face.
Google, on the other hand, has done great. They will survive on the kind of advertising that has kept newspapers publishing forever - small and large business benefit from it. This is a product that will always yield another crop.
You have some brown stuff on your nose, you may want to wipe that off ;)
I am no fan of Microsoft but truth comes first. Twitter, you just got your ass handed to you... again!
Make SELinux enforcing again!
The style and tone of symbolset's writing isn't rabid enough to pass for Twitter's. I get the impression that symbolset's preference of FOSS systems over Microsoft comes from reason and experience, not thoughtless ideology.
I have a hard time believing that Twitter could suppress his colossal ego long enough to keep a sockpuppet under the radar like that.
Maybe he's a good enough performance artist to tell "himself" to be reasonable, but I doubt that Twitter knows the meaning of the word "reasonable".