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Microsoft Shareholders Unhappy After Annual Meeting

Posted by Unknown on from the 15-minutes-should-be-enough-for-anyone dept.

Kozar_The_Malignant writes "Microsoft shareholders left today's annual meeting grumbling about the 15 minute Q&A period with Bill Gates and Steve Balmer and the lack of any real specifics about corporate direction. Many shareholders are concerned about Microsoft's static share price over the last decade."

22 of 521 comments (clear)

  1. Simple solution.... by ThisIsNotMyHandel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Simple solution to a simple problem. SELL THE STOCK.

    1. Re:Simple solution.... by fsckmnky · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Many people fail to execute the simple solution, as it might require them to admit they were wrong to buy it in the first place. It's a well known psychological shortfall who's proper term I can't recall atm. Like anti-buyers-remorse.

    2. Re:Simple solution.... by Ihmhi · · Score: 5, Informative

      Would the term you're thinking of happen to be the sunk cost fallacy?

      --
      Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
    3. Re:Simple solution.... by fsckmnky · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yeah, that describes it nicely, although I think the one I was originally thinking of was "confirmation bias" as I had recently read an article on cracked.com titled '5 Logical Fallacies That Make You Wrong More Than You Think."

      link for those interested.

      http://www.cracked.com/article_19468_5-logical-fallacies-that-make-you-wrong-more-than-you-think_p2.html

    4. Re:Simple solution.... by PopeRatzo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Many people fail to execute the simple solution, as it might require them to admit they were wrong to buy it in the first place.

      Actually, the reason they fail to execute the solution is because they're getting a nice dividend, strong stock price and a fair amount of peace of mind.

      The people who are pissed off about the lack of constantly increasing stock price are the big institutional investors who want to play the volatility game, betting the options on both sides. Hedge funds and like that.

      Most of the normal people who invested in Microsoft are not complaining because, although they're not getting huge capital gains, a nice check comes from Microsoft every quarter in dividends. Plus, there has been steady growth.

      So, if you're looking for a little stable income, Microsoft a decade ago was a good way to go. Apple had more volatility, it jumped further, but when it comes to paying dividends, they've given the finger to their investors, choosing to put their enormous profits into a "war chest" instead of rewarding the people who have stuck with them. Those cocksuckers have $76billion in cash and can't pay a dividend. Assholes.

      Full disclosure: I own both Apple and Microsoft stock. I sell Apple on the highs, and it's paid for a big chunk of my daughter's education. The Microsoft I keep, up or down, and those dividend checks continue to pay the real estate taxes on my Chi-town Vatican. Year after year after year. And when the day comes that my wife decides it's time to move to Montenegro and grow figs and look at the Adriatic, we'll sell off the Microsoft and it will have held up its end of the bargain very nicely. All of the Apple I bought will be gone long before then because the only way to make money with Apple is by selling the highs.

      Yeah, I like to look at the Apple stock price, especially after a new iPhone is announced and all the fruits race down to stand in line at the Apple Store because I like to time the sale of some shares immediately thereafte. Then, when the inevitable battery issues or reception issues start to hit the news, I'll think about adding a few shares, but never as many as I sold because the price is too damn high. But the Microsoft, I don't even look at the price, I just dollar cost average some shares every quarter, comfortable knowing it's piling up and bringing me steady income.

      To be honest, it was only sheer luck that this all worked out for me. I don't know fuck-all about investing. I just liked the products and when I got my first real job, a single guy, I bought shares.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    5. Re:Simple solution.... by NatasRevol · · Score: 5, Informative

      The dividend is currently paying 3%. That's not a nice check, that's a cost of living increase while you can't spend your core assets.

      If you want a decent dividend check, look at utility stocks - 6 to 8%. So 2+ times larger checks.
      Or communications companies, that are paying 6-15% dividends.

      --
      There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
    6. Re:Simple solution.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      The dividend is currently paying 3%.

      Investing in MSFT is like buying government treasuries, only the yield is higher and Microsoft is less likely to default.

    7. Re:Simple solution.... by CodeBuster · · Score: 5, Interesting

      big institutional investors who want to play the volatility game

      Then why are they buying Microsoft (MSFT) of all things? Microsoft is a dividend safety play and has been for at least a decade now. It's not Microsoft's fault that these pension funds promised their members payouts based on 8%+ returns when the only way to get them these days is to go risk-on heavy into high yield bonds, small to mid cap stocks or options, futures and derivatives (aka the financial weapons of mass pension fund destruction). They should either man up and sell their shares so that they can make those plays and get those 8%+ returns (or not) or they should sit down, shut up and be happy that they still have their principal and the dividend was paid on time. This is the new reality of investing and personally, I don't think that things will ever get back to 8%+ consistently on average, or at least not here in the United States or Europe. We live in a world of increasing population, increased demand and increasing depletion of natural resources. We won't have another fossil fueled 20th century of growth and investors, just like everyone else, are going to have to get used to that and plan accordingly.

  2. Just now they're "disgruntled"? by bmo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=MSFT+Interactive#symbol=MSFT;range=my

    Just look at that chart. Look at it, guys. It's been down and flat since 2000. Yes, that chart is split-adjusted. All Y! stock charts are split adjusted. If you want growth, Microsoft is not where you want to be.

    And the outlook is not encouraging. Just look at Windows 8.

    --
    BMO

    1. Re:Just now they're "disgruntled"? by Antony+T+Curtis · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's more telling when you add GOOG and AAPL to the same graph...

      Over the last 10 years, MSFT is near 0% growth, GOOG is a little under 500% growth.... AAPL is around 4000% growth.

      That makes MSFT a poor long-term investment choice.

      --
      No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
    2. Re:Just now they're "disgruntled"? by JoeMerchant · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Dividends are not growth.

      Learn stock basics.

      I'm an investor, I care about DI/DO - dollars in / dollars out. Dividends matter. Give me a flat stock price and reliable 20% dividends and I don't care at all about growth.

    3. Re:Just now they're "disgruntled"? by amiga3D · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The fact is that Microsoft is very profitable. They make money. Lots and lots of money. The problem is that they treat their investors and their customers like shit. It doesn't matter though, because they're microsoft. AT&T was just like this before they were broken up. They treated everyone like shit because they could and microsoft, the great monopoly of our day does the same. Monopolies don't have to act like other companies because.....they're monopolies.

    4. Re:Just now they're "disgruntled"? by ceoyoyo · · Score: 5, Informative

      That's what we call a log scale, and it's the appropriate way to represent things like this. To an investor, the stock going from $5 to $10 is the same as it going from $100 to $200. A log scale shows that as the same increment. A linear scale doesn't.

      Sure, give Ballmer some kudos for keeping the stock price from dropping TOO much after 2000 (it did drop). Are you using the bubble popping excuse for the whole ten years since then?

    5. Re:Just now they're "disgruntled"? by DusterBar · · Score: 5, Insightful

      While Microsoft stock is not going up, it is unclear why. The company has, over the last 10 years, over doubled revenue and almost tripled profit. And it did this in an environment where they held 80+% of their primary market. This requires innovation and growth into new markets since you can't grow much when you already have 80+%

      Looking at Apple, they have done well. Made products people want. Gained technology to product price competitive products. But the real point is that they were under 3% of the market and now are at 12% or so. Microsoft still is over 80% but the point is that growing by 9 basis points for Microsoft would be just over 10% but for apple it was 400% growth. In fact, there is no way Microsoft can grow more that 25% in their primary market as, well, that would put them at 100%, The growth potential is almost all in other markets and new technologies. Apple, on the other hand, has tons of room to grow into if they can take more market share. However, if you look at their actual financial data, it is the new markets that really pushed them forward over the last 10 years. They executed very well in identifying new opportunities and taking the risk to enter those markets at the right point.

      Microsoft is currently, I believe, undervalued. Microsoft does have some very bright people and some compelling products coming, And they continue to be stable too. Not that Apple is not in a major growth spurt, but they are also valued relatively highly compared to earnings.

  3. There's no excuse for a 15 min Q&A by elbonia · · Score: 5, Insightful
    If Warren Buffet (81) can spend the day answering question for his shareholders, Balmer (55) should have no problem with doing at least 2-3 hours. The only possible reason is that Balmer and Gates knew they didn't have good answers which can be seen here,

    http://www.geekwire.com/2011/microsoft-shareholder-meeting

    I would have left too if those were the best answers I could come up with for those questions.

  4. Unhappy about static share price? by qubezz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That makes Microsoft a blue-chip stock, like GM or IBM. They are not a bubble rally pump and dump stock. The ultimate value of a company is not what a wall street casino game of money chicken assigns to it, and listening to the gamblers is hardly the course that will find improvement.

  5. Shareholders are stupid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Static share price for the past decade, but:

    revenue:
    2000: 22.96 billion
    2011: 69.94 billion (ms ends their year on 6/30.. so this is 6/30/10 - 6/30/11)

    profits:
    2000: 9.42 billion
    2011: 23.15 billion

    Yep.. shareholders are stupid. Not Microsoft's fault they don't want to reward their success.

    2000 income announcement
    2011 income statement

  6. Microsoft by br00tus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In my mind, the last real Microsoft innovations that happened were in the year period between late 1995 and early 1996. That is when Windows 95 came out and Windows NT 4.0. Windows 95 had a lot of things going for it - it had Internet capability included, so people didn't have to go through a rigmarole with Hyperterminal to download Trumpet Winsock from somewhere via X-modem. It had a nice, Mac-like GUI. It was nice - they even had Mac-like touches, like hiring Brian Eno to do the sound for when the computer started, a launch campaign with a Rolling Stones sound etc. Insofar as NT 4.0 - it was the first Windows server which wasn't total garbage. I had to administer a NT 3.51 server for a while, to my chagrin. 4.0 wasn't great, but it wasn't complete garbage like previous efforts. NT 4.0 also introduced the Terminal Services Client, later called Remote Desktop.

    SQL Server began coming out before any of this. I don't really like Exchange Server or Outlook, but they came out in 1996 and 1997 respectively. What has Microsoft really come out with since then? They completely missed the boat on smartphones and tablets - they are less than 1% market share for both markets. I just finished reading Job's biography - he mentions that Microsoft had been working on tablets forever. He blames their focus on the stylus, and compatibility with the existing Microsoft monopoly, I mean framework, as the drawbacks to it. Microsoft just seems to be unable to anything new. They started by porting an existing product, BASIC. Then they ripped of CP/M - some say in a straight pirate-like fashion. Then they rip off Apple's Mac interface (which Apple themselves ripped off from Xerox). Microsoft is great at copying others ideas and doing all the back end, support, marketing, licensing business stuff, they are not so great at inventing stuff. A then much smaller company like Apple was able to eat their lunch in the tablet and smartphone space. Google bought Android, and helped it grow to where it now owns smartphones, and is doing respectably on tablets, at least more respectably than Microsoft.

    Microsoft has just been resting on its monopoly and sitting on its laurels. They put out garbage that technicians hate to use, but are sometimes forced to. With Windows 95, I used to get a CD where I could reinstall Windows if I wanted. Then they started that horrible OEM recover CD, where you couldn't just fresh install Windows like you wanted to - like you can with a CD of Linux or FreeBSD or whatnot. I mean, they took a step backwards, to protect themselves from piracy - a concern people making Debian CD's have no concern about. Other people are out innovating, they are at work crippling your ability to do things you were able to do with previous installations of Windows.

  7. Many regular people own MSFT by perpenso · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Anything that makes Microsoft or Microsoft shareholders unhappy is a good thing, IMHO.

    Until one considers people with a pension plan, IRA, or 401K. For many of these people with the later two they don't pick individual stocks, they pick funds that are managed by a "pro". Many of these funds own Microsoft.

    1. Re:Many regular people own MSFT by Runaway1956 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      LOL - that office suite. After having bought out and/or squashed a lot of good competition, you'd think that Microsoft would have a superb office suite. And, given all the years that they've had to perfect it, it should be better than merely superb.

      Maybe if they hadn't wasted all that time trying to embrace, extend, and extinguish all competing document formats, while advancing their own proprietary crap formats, they could actually have created office tools that always work, on any platform, any time and anywhere.

      If that were the case, they could probably sell licenses for that suite for around ten dollars, and make a nice profit.

      The shame is, I'll be fooling around with MS Office in the next couple days. I need to create a couple of documents, which are real easy to create in Open Office or LibreOffice. Unfortunately, the computers on which the documents will be used have had problems with documents that I've created in the past. The XP machines can't read ODF, and something gets lost in translation when I tell Open Office to save documents in other formats.

      So - one more time, I'll be installing a pirated version of MS Office into a virtual machine, just to create a couple of simple documents. Then, I'll just revert the VM back to a snapshot taken before installation.

      Life could be so much simpler, if MS actually cooperated with the rest of the world on standards.

      --
      "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
  8. Re:So much Softie Butthurt(TM) by moderatorrater · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I've got a theory. Here's some of your last few modded down comments. They're all -1 flamebait. See if you can see why.

    You're stupid.
    I'm smarter than you.
    Deal with it.

    Oh look the years that the company was left to colored sugar-water salesmen and bean counters. Not the dynamic and growing company it is now.

    Yes, and if I had been born in an earlier decade, I could have bought IBM when there was a market of "four to five computers"

    Moron.

    Oh, look, a softie redefining words at whim.

    You're an idiot.

    Here, have another chart. This is growth.

    You should have bought AAPL, ya dummy.

    http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=MSFT&t=5y&l=off&z=l&q=l&c=aapl

    Of your last six comments, 2 are at +5, 3 are at -1, and one is at +2 (at the time of this writing). For what it's worth, I agree with every one of them.

  9. Re:I like Ballmer by symbolset · · Score: 5, Informative

    Oh, no... You misunderstood me. Milking the Windows and Office cows until they're dead is just what I want him to do. I don't want him to have a vision for the future. I don't want him to grasp the significance of the transition to mobile. He thinks XBox is a huge win, and that's just what I want him to think. He thinks Windows Phone and Online Services Division have got a chance in Hell, and I'm OK with that. He probably thinks he's going to make something useful out of Skype. He's going to anchor all "innovations" and acquisitions with "business drivers" until they won't fly. There's no danger he's going to "get it" so I hope they keep him until the end. When your opponent is making a mistake, don't interrupt.

    To me this Microsoft debacle is a distraction from the potential progress we could have had these past three decades. Microsoft's goal isn't innovation, it's control of innovation. The prevention of innovation they don't control is Microsoft's goal, and they were great at it under Gates but less so under Ballmer. They've done so well with this that they're now introducing features we had 30 years ago in Unix, and being lauded for it. Their current patent trolling is just the chancres of a much deeper disease. Fortunately for us and unfortunately for them, the innate creativity of people is a force that can be slowed but not stopped. Eventually a way is found.

    With people Microsoft's goal seems to be to destroy morale as fast as possible. Their forced ranking system informs one employee in five that he's on the way out - some say two in five. You can only watch that for so long before you know that one day they come for you no matter what you do. Microsoft only hires people good at math so let's do the math. If the odds of you surviving the next year at Microsoft are 0.8 and the distribution is totally random then your odds of surviving 20 years is 0.8 to the 20th power, or one in a hundred. But we all know the distribution isn't random. Most everybody has in their life a bad year and nobody knows they're not going to have one with divorce, the loss of a loved one that drives you to depression, physical illness, ordinary loss of focus, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that induce you to produce less than your peers - no matter how good you are. Even if you don't have a bad year the currently rumored "Young Up Microsoft" program tilts the scale from "insanely difficult" to "impossible". So after about your third year there you know that this isn't a career path that leads to retirement. That shifts the personal goal of employees from "do what's best" to "get what you can before you're canned". Since new-hires have a well-known "grace year" because otherwise the hirer would suffer, for some segment of the new hires this translates to "don't get caught scrapping the walls for copper." Obviously this internal strategy served the short-term bottom line at some point in the past and is now a cultural anomaly like cargo cults but the rest of us eventually benefit so I hope they don't change it.

    Microsoft's core products are Windows and Office. An operating environment and a suite of basic applications. The operating environment isn't as secure and robust as many we had 30 years ago, and does the same thing it did then: provide an environment for applications to run in. The suite of applications isn't even organic - they bought them all - and hasn't really changed in productivity in fifteen years. There are only so many ways to put glyphs on a page and do a mail merge. The spreadsheet feature wars ended sometime in 1989 when every spreadsheet had more features than three sigmas of users would ever access. Databases and presentations took a little longer - and to be fair the features they didn't buy there they outright stole. Microsoft won the office software wars not by making better software, but by ensuring that competing software wouldn't run well on their OS - and when they won, they stopped giving more value. This is being worked around by various

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