They don't have much tech, but they have a good sales team.
Overture's product is to add "sponsored results" to search results. Their original GoTo.com product was nothing more than Inktomi's results with their sponsored results on top. Now, renamed as Overture their business is to sell the ads that get put at the top results at Yahoo and other search engines... pretty much all of the majors other that Google who does it themselves.
Basically, Yahoo's buying their supplier of sponsored results instead of building their own sponsored results system...
Huh? By definition, spread spectrum bounces all over the given band of frequencies in some predetermined patern. It makes it a bit harder to jam, because you'd have to cover all of the frequencies with the jamming signal, but not impossible if the attacker can just jam the whole frequency range.
Furthermore, spread spectrum makes things a whole lot harder on the transmitters on the ground. Let's use a simple example, imagine a satellite with channel space for 6 upbound signals coming from 6 different TV networks that are located at 6 different studios. In simple frequency division, they'd each get 1 slot of bandwidth, and so long as nobody retunes their transmitter to somebody else's frequency it all works. But, in spread spectrum, they'd each be all over the band... unless coordination was very tight between the spreading patern, the 6 sources would keep jamming each other by being on the same frequency at the same moment... you'd need a ton of retransmitting and error correction to get around that.
Actually, in the software industry perfection is deadly.
Imagine what would happen if Windows ever reached perfection. How would Microsoft ever get anybody to upgrade? Users already have the perfect operating operating system in hand. The only way to stay in business is to convert to a subscription license, and we all know how poorly that goes.
You're right, it's a situation-by-situation call where you just have to place your bet and go with it. Nobody knows if he who does it first or he who does it right is going to win in the market. Being early can get you the contract, but being buggy can cost you the contract. There's no way of knowing which is the right decision until after the fact.
But, the problem I see is that your company can't seem to agree on which way you should do things. Marketing wants quick and dirty, while your bosses want slow and proper... you can't have it both ways. Either your boss needs to tell marketing to shut up, or marketing needs to tell your boss to put up with it. Until that happens, you've got contrary instructions... and there's no way to follow both at the same time.
Doing what your boss wants is the simple thing to do if you don't want to be labeled as one that causes trouble. On the other hand, pointing out trouble when there really is in fact already a problem could label you as a leader, possibly somebody who is deserving of a promotion to management. Tough call there too..
Radio stations pay royalties only to the artist organizations, but web streamers have been ordered by law to pay both the same fee tot he artist, and a seperate fee to the labels. The resulting fee effectively doubles the cost of playing a song because it's about the same number.
But these netstreamers are claiming that the RIAA cheated in the process to determining number. The RIAA presented to CARP, the division of the Library of Congress named in the law as the authority who sets the statutory rate and reviews it from time to time, an "agreement" between the RIAA and VOW. This group of webcasters is saying that the talks between the RIAA and VOW didn't result in a useful agreement because many of the webcasters who have to pay this statutory rate aren't members of the VOW, and in fact are small scrapy competitors to the VOW members. Their claim is that the VOW rolled over and agreed to a price that hardly anybody can afford because the VOW members wanted to commit industry suicide (which effectively happened, look at all the webstreams that vanished as soon as the CARP ruling came down) because the VOW membership is too closely aligned with the broadcast interests who would benefit from the lack of webstreaming.
If this new royalty applied to the over the air radio stations too, you'd be sure they would have activated their lobbists by now...
Basically, it's the same thing as radio broadcasters. Because it'd be impossible to accurately account for all the micropayments involved, radio stations simply make an all-covering per-listener-times-per-song (take the average number of songs per hour, multiply by hours in a month, multiply by the station's average rating) fee to an group that divides up the money. Some margin of error mistakes happen, but it's a pretty fair system.
The problem comes that the rate that OTA radio is paying per-listener-per-song is about half of what web streamed radio pays per-lister-per-song, which were the fees that came down and killed most of webstreaming. This group is now accusing the RIAA of cheating during the process that determined the fee to get a more-favorable-to-the-RIAA outcome.
The broadcasters, like you, have no argument here. If they want to play music from unsigned artists, they can. And if they would sign those artists to contracts before the RIAA gets to them, granting them rights to play given works no matter what, then the RIAA couldn't even prevent it after they signed the artists.
You missed something here. Signing such a contract giving rights to play to your early recordings before signing an RIAA contract just doesn't happen. Because signing such a deal makes it certain that an RIAA contract isn't coming your way. If you try to promote yourself the RIAA's system, then the RIAA's system will see to it that they are closed to you. Any radio station that plays even a small ammount non-RIAA music is punished by non-access. They'll find whatever artist is hot at the moment in their section of music all over the closest station in format to them in their area. It becomes very hard to compete when your opponent has all of the major artist exclusives such as interviews and local-premire songs and you don't.
The broadcasters, like you, have no argument here. I'm a broadcaster? I didn't know that...
But the artists aren't going to do that because they see the RIAA as the master of the market, and lawsuits like these only perpeptuate that control. Hold on, did you RFTA? The RIAA isn't suing webcasters, a group of webcasters are suing the RIAA for anti-competitive behavior during the legal process that set the webcasting rates because they presented an agreement between the RIAA and the a group "representing the webcasting industry" that didn't include any representation for them, yet they're bound by this statutory price too. They're basically accusing the RIAA of cheating Microsoft-style.
Typical straw-man situation. They struck a deal with the 13 webcasters most friendly to them, rather than the webscasters that they already ran out of business. They're trying to claim those 13 represent the whole population of webcasters, but they don't.
Recording and radio are two very different models for distributing music. Recorded music is sold in a play-when-you-want-it form that the artist and their promoters expect to be paid for. Radio is the establishment of a channel through which music is pushed, and the artists see this as a promotional vehicle.
Artists need radio airplay to start their carrers. Hardly anybody will pay to hear an artist they've never heard before, so it's a critical first step in becoming an established artist so they can make sales with CDs and concert tickets. It's the free samples they give away so people will be more likely to buy the products.
The thing is, the RIAA tries to keep radio stations on a tight leash. If you want to have early access to the hot new song from established artist A, you have to play the songs from the not-yet-known-to-anybody artists B, C, and D. They RIAA tries hard to claim that there's not a specific quid-pro-quo, but everybody knows its the stations that are most cooperative in playing the arists the label wants played that get the most access to that label's popular artists.
This is why the RIAA would like to see the small time indie webstreamers vanish... if they're playing indie music they'll create demand for the artists who aren't being distributed by the RIAA members, and effectively steal market share from them. If it were possible for an artist to establish credibilty through non-RIAA means such as indie webstreamers and P2P downloads, and then get thier songs onto over-the-air radio stations, that artist could then enter the concert market and bypass the RIAA altogether. The RIAA would like the rule that you must already have an RIAA-published CD before being heard radio channels to hold true because that cements their role in the process, however the technology now exists to promote an artist without ever having a CD... and that's what really scares the RIAA.
They need to be tried separately because there was no ruling, just a very unfavorable out of court settlement that Bonzi agreed to, which is more or less an unofficial acceptance of the fact that they were going to lose if the trial happened
It was CBS who had Dan Rather sitting in a Studio overlooking Times Square for Y2K coverage, but the famous Times Square Jumbotron has an NBC peacock on it and it's input is controled by NBC. CBS didn't want to allow NBC to control something going on behind Dan Rather's sholder, so they used a positional technology to cover up the jumbotron with a screensaverish animation of CBS logos. NBC complained loudly to anybody willing to listen, but nothing much came of it other than the fact that the existance of the change was pointed out.
Similarly, the owners of the real Times Square billboards complained that the recent Spiderman movie went to painstaking steps to recreate Times Square in their computer animations, but their billboards were forgotten and replaced with virtual billboards that were sold by by the moviemakers. They went to court telling about how much money they paid to obtain their billboard placements and how much it meant to them... and then they got laughed out of court.
Most Gator installations are done without the knowledge of the person who has it altering their desktop. (Remember, the general populace will click YES to anything)
And there's the real problem. You see, the courts can't protect people from their own stupidity. How about somebody telling people to actually read an EULA once in a while... I'm sure we can get a few GPL zealots to help with this one.
Unfortunately, the business that sells computer parts doesn't have a right to complain about that because the user who didn't read the EULA agreed to have those ads show up.
What this business (and all of the others bothered by this tactic) need to do is to educate the masses about how they've been tricked by agreeing to an EULA they didn't read, and now have a bad program that they didn't mean to install on their computer. Organize a mass uninstall of WhenU and Gator's clients, and those companies suddenly vaporize.
Or, simply put, we need the companies like Symantec to consider any program that is distributed by tag-along means to be a trojan horse virus (even if it does technically click a "Yes" somewhere in the sequence) and then wipes it out.
No, the judges just got the wrong plantiff in front of them. U-Haul can't sue saying Joe User was tricked into installing software he didn't want, Joe User has to file that case.
No, but it's legal for you to buy the plot of land next to the billboard and (subject to getting the proper construction permits) build a bigger board of your own in front of their board. Their board is still there unharmed, it just becomes useless because nobody can see it.
Yes, but both Fox News and CNN consent to allowing that to happen because they each have a 2 minute "local window" within every hour of programming, a commercial block that is specifically marked with metadata as belonging to the cable or DBS provider's ads. The cable/DBS company can then sell those ads to whomever they want, and that just happens to be a rival cable channel so be it. The stations view that as part of the deal they have to make to get onto the cable TV dial.
The difference here is that U-Haul has no relationship with WhenU at all... they'd rather WhenU simply go away.
If you wanna control people, control communication
on
VoIP Booming in Africa
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· Score: 3, Insightful
In the old Soviet Russia, one of the first signs that there is an attempted coup in progress was that the Moscow TV stations were invaded by supporters of whomever is trying to take power. The reason was simple, if you controled the TV signals you controled the easiest means of communications with the people, and one of their few sources of news. You could tell your story uninterfered with, and block the other side's ability to tell theirs.
This is why governments want to control their phone systems, and why they don't really want it to work that well. They don't want it to be too easy for their subjects to communicate with each other, particularlly they're scared somebody's going to discuss the overthrow of those in power. The ability to freely communicate and have at least something that resembles a fair election of leaders is taken for granted in most of North America and Europe, but in other places it's not so easy.
So, by creating a telephone monopoly that makes a half-hearted effort, they've been able to say that they have telephone service for business purposes, while still limiting their people's ability to talk to each other over distance. But, the Internet snuck up on these regimes from behind, and just now they're realizing they forgot to regulate and monopolize it. VoIP isn't that good or reliable compared to well-maintained phone systems, but it's pretty good compared to intentionally mismanaged ones. Competition is usually welecomed because it forces the old monopoly to either perform to the best of its abilities or get out of the game, but this time the monopoly is just crying to the rulers and the rulers see the need to solve this problem the same way they solve any other threat to their ability to stay in power...
VoIP is an idea that looks interesting on the chalkboard but there's no reason for Americans to convert to it when they have an ultra-reliable phone network and pretty good cell phone coverage in populated areas. It's the places that don't have those things that really need VoIP.
Not this time. If that 8 cent dividend were to become a 10 cent dividend, then the expectation is that more 10 cent dividends were to come and the stock would rise. But that's not what this is about... this would be a one-time dividend based on cash that Microsoft has been stockpiling for no particular reason, there's no expectation that this would happen a second time.
If Microsoft does go through with a $1 a share dividend, expect to see the stock drop by exactly $1 the moment it goes into effect.
Why? Because that $1 is moving out of the company and in to the hands of the owner of each share. If I sold you that share before the effective date, that $1 would be within that MSFT share, after the effective date the $1 bill pops out of the stock certificate and can be seperated from it... paying this cash out effectively devaules the company by $10 Billion dollars with 10 billion shares outstanding, so take $10 Billion off the market cap and you're back to $1 per share movement in the price... the numbers all sum back to 0 in the end.
A dividend doesn't actually create wealth or value, it just devides it up... that's where they get the word from.
Microsoft is clearly considering this massive dividend because the recent tax cuts that just went into effect mean that a dividend now will be taxed less than if Microsoft had distributed the money in previous years. Yes, Gates gets to pocket a 10-figure number of dollars out of such a transaction and he really doesn't need the money... but the average american actually owns a few shares of MSFT stock without even realizing it, buried within the mutual fund in a 401k or such.
This could have the same economic effect of a $10 Billion tax cut, dropping money back into play in the American economy where hopefully it'll inspire John Q. Public to spend a little more at the local shopping mall. Alone, $5-6 dollars isn't really going to do this, but if this inspires other companies that have been hording cash for a rainy day to declare a larger-than-usual dividend, that trend could turn your retirement fund's investments around to start facing the right direction again.
Unfortunately, this smells a bit little too much like trickle-down economics, so the odds of this working out perfectly and the way G.W. Bush had on his chalkboard are a bit slim. But at least the first few dominoes are falling as they're supposed to...
Slashdot Mirror
They don't have much tech, but they have a good sales team.
Overture's product is to add "sponsored results" to search results. Their original GoTo.com product was nothing more than Inktomi's results with their sponsored results on top. Now, renamed as Overture their business is to sell the ads that get put at the top results at Yahoo and other search engines... pretty much all of the majors other that Google who does it themselves.
Basically, Yahoo's buying their supplier of sponsored results instead of building their own sponsored results system...
Spread spectrum is essentially unjammable
Huh? By definition, spread spectrum bounces all over the given band of frequencies in some predetermined patern. It makes it a bit harder to jam, because you'd have to cover all of the frequencies with the jamming signal, but not impossible if the attacker can just jam the whole frequency range.
Furthermore, spread spectrum makes things a whole lot harder on the transmitters on the ground. Let's use a simple example, imagine a satellite with channel space for 6 upbound signals coming from 6 different TV networks that are located at 6 different studios. In simple frequency division, they'd each get 1 slot of bandwidth, and so long as nobody retunes their transmitter to somebody else's frequency it all works. But, in spread spectrum, they'd each be all over the band... unless coordination was very tight between the spreading patern, the 6 sources would keep jamming each other by being on the same frequency at the same moment... you'd need a ton of retransmitting and error correction to get around that.
Actually, in the software industry perfection is deadly.
Imagine what would happen if Windows ever reached perfection. How would Microsoft ever get anybody to upgrade? Users already have the perfect operating operating system in hand. The only way to stay in business is to convert to a subscription license, and we all know how poorly that goes.
You're right, it's a situation-by-situation call where you just have to place your bet and go with it. Nobody knows if he who does it first or he who does it right is going to win in the market. Being early can get you the contract, but being buggy can cost you the contract. There's no way of knowing which is the right decision until after the fact.
But, the problem I see is that your company can't seem to agree on which way you should do things. Marketing wants quick and dirty, while your bosses want slow and proper... you can't have it both ways. Either your boss needs to tell marketing to shut up, or marketing needs to tell your boss to put up with it. Until that happens, you've got contrary instructions... and there's no way to follow both at the same time.
Doing what your boss wants is the simple thing to do if you don't want to be labeled as one that causes trouble. On the other hand, pointing out trouble when there really is in fact already a problem could label you as a leader, possibly somebody who is deserving of a promotion to management. Tough call there too..
Radio stations pay royalties only to the artist organizations, but web streamers have been ordered by law to pay both the same fee tot he artist, and a seperate fee to the labels. The resulting fee effectively doubles the cost of playing a song because it's about the same number.
But these netstreamers are claiming that the RIAA cheated in the process to determining number. The RIAA presented to CARP, the division of the Library of Congress named in the law as the authority who sets the statutory rate and reviews it from time to time, an "agreement" between the RIAA and VOW. This group of webcasters is saying that the talks between the RIAA and VOW didn't result in a useful agreement because many of the webcasters who have to pay this statutory rate aren't members of the VOW, and in fact are small scrapy competitors to the VOW members. Their claim is that the VOW rolled over and agreed to a price that hardly anybody can afford because the VOW members wanted to commit industry suicide (which effectively happened, look at all the webstreams that vanished as soon as the CARP ruling came down) because the VOW membership is too closely aligned with the broadcast interests who would benefit from the lack of webstreaming.
If this new royalty applied to the over the air radio stations too, you'd be sure they would have activated their lobbists by now...
Yep, that's the "statutory royalty" clause.
Basically, it's the same thing as radio broadcasters. Because it'd be impossible to accurately account for all the micropayments involved, radio stations simply make an all-covering per-listener-times-per-song (take the average number of songs per hour, multiply by hours in a month, multiply by the station's average rating) fee to an group that divides up the money. Some margin of error mistakes happen, but it's a pretty fair system.
The problem comes that the rate that OTA radio is paying per-listener-per-song is about half of what web streamed radio pays per-lister-per-song, which were the fees that came down and killed most of webstreaming. This group is now accusing the RIAA of cheating during the process that determined the fee to get a more-favorable-to-the-RIAA outcome.
The broadcasters, like you, have no argument here. If they want to play music from unsigned artists, they can. And if they would sign those artists to contracts before the RIAA gets to them, granting them rights to play given works no matter what, then the RIAA couldn't even prevent it after they signed the artists.
You missed something here. Signing such a contract giving rights to play to your early recordings before signing an RIAA contract just doesn't happen. Because signing such a deal makes it certain that an RIAA contract isn't coming your way. If you try to promote yourself the RIAA's system, then the RIAA's system will see to it that they are closed to you. Any radio station that plays even a small ammount non-RIAA music is punished by non-access. They'll find whatever artist is hot at the moment in their section of music all over the closest station in format to them in their area. It becomes very hard to compete when your opponent has all of the major artist exclusives such as interviews and local-premire songs and you don't.
The broadcasters, like you, have no argument here.
I'm a broadcaster? I didn't know that...
But the artists aren't going to do that because they see the RIAA as the master of the market, and lawsuits like these only perpeptuate that control.
Hold on, did you RFTA? The RIAA isn't suing webcasters, a group of webcasters are suing the RIAA for anti-competitive behavior during the legal process that set the webcasting rates because they presented an agreement between the RIAA and the a group "representing the webcasting industry" that didn't include any representation for them, yet they're bound by this statutory price too. They're basically accusing the RIAA of cheating Microsoft-style.
Typical straw-man situation. They struck a deal with the 13 webcasters most friendly to them, rather than the webscasters that they already ran out of business. They're trying to claim those 13 represent the whole population of webcasters, but they don't.
Recording and radio are two very different models for distributing music. Recorded music is sold in a play-when-you-want-it form that the artist and their promoters expect to be paid for. Radio is the establishment of a channel through which music is pushed, and the artists see this as a promotional vehicle.
Artists need radio airplay to start their carrers. Hardly anybody will pay to hear an artist they've never heard before, so it's a critical first step in becoming an established artist so they can make sales with CDs and concert tickets. It's the free samples they give away so people will be more likely to buy the products.
The thing is, the RIAA tries to keep radio stations on a tight leash. If you want to have early access to the hot new song from established artist A, you have to play the songs from the not-yet-known-to-anybody artists B, C, and D. They RIAA tries hard to claim that there's not a specific quid-pro-quo, but everybody knows its the stations that are most cooperative in playing the arists the label wants played that get the most access to that label's popular artists.
This is why the RIAA would like to see the small time indie webstreamers vanish... if they're playing indie music they'll create demand for the artists who aren't being distributed by the RIAA members, and effectively steal market share from them. If it were possible for an artist to establish credibilty through non-RIAA means such as indie webstreamers and P2P downloads, and then get thier songs onto over-the-air radio stations, that artist could then enter the concert market and bypass the RIAA altogether. The RIAA would like the rule that you must already have an RIAA-published CD before being heard radio channels to hold true because that cements their role in the process, however the technology now exists to promote an artist without ever having a CD... and that's what really scares the RIAA.
They need to be tried separately because there was no ruling, just a very unfavorable out of court settlement that Bonzi agreed to, which is more or less an unofficial acceptance of the fact that they were going to lose if the trial happened
It was CBS who had Dan Rather sitting in a Studio overlooking Times Square for Y2K coverage, but the famous Times Square Jumbotron has an NBC peacock on it and it's input is controled by NBC. CBS didn't want to allow NBC to control something going on behind Dan Rather's sholder, so they used a positional technology to cover up the jumbotron with a screensaverish animation of CBS logos. NBC complained loudly to anybody willing to listen, but nothing much came of it other than the fact that the existance of the change was pointed out.
Similarly, the owners of the real Times Square billboards complained that the recent Spiderman movie went to painstaking steps to recreate Times Square in their computer animations, but their billboards were forgotten and replaced with virtual billboards that were sold by by the moviemakers. They went to court telling about how much money they paid to obtain their billboard placements and how much it meant to them... and then they got laughed out of court.
Or what if a program simply *removed* that ad...
Most Gator installations are done without the knowledge of the person who has it altering their desktop. (Remember, the general populace will click YES to anything)
And there's the real problem. You see, the courts can't protect people from their own stupidity. How about somebody telling people to actually read an EULA once in a while... I'm sure we can get a few GPL zealots to help with this one.
No, that post was Offtopic Flamebait posted by a Troll. It was definitely Overrated.
Uhm... this is a case where the smaller business in the lawsuit prevailed!
Please post your anti-bussines flamebait in a more appropriate discussion.
Unfortunately, the business that sells computer parts doesn't have a right to complain about that because the user who didn't read the EULA agreed to have those ads show up.
What this business (and all of the others bothered by this tactic) need to do is to educate the masses about how they've been tricked by agreeing to an EULA they didn't read, and now have a bad program that they didn't mean to install on their computer. Organize a mass uninstall of WhenU and Gator's clients, and those companies suddenly vaporize.
Actually, this one has been solved already. Bonzi was cornered into a settlement that made them promise never to use such an ad again.
Or, simply put, we need the companies like Symantec to consider any program that is distributed by tag-along means to be a trojan horse virus (even if it does technically click a "Yes" somewhere in the sequence) and then wipes it out.
No, the judges just got the wrong plantiff in front of them. U-Haul can't sue saying Joe User was tricked into installing software he didn't want, Joe User has to file that case.
No, but it's legal for you to buy the plot of land next to the billboard and (subject to getting the proper construction permits) build a bigger board of your own in front of their board. Their board is still there unharmed, it just becomes useless because nobody can see it.
Yes, but both Fox News and CNN consent to allowing that to happen because they each have a 2 minute "local window" within every hour of programming, a commercial block that is specifically marked with metadata as belonging to the cable or DBS provider's ads. The cable/DBS company can then sell those ads to whomever they want, and that just happens to be a rival cable channel so be it. The stations view that as part of the deal they have to make to get onto the cable TV dial.
The difference here is that U-Haul has no relationship with WhenU at all... they'd rather WhenU simply go away.
In the old Soviet Russia, one of the first signs that there is an attempted coup in progress was that the Moscow TV stations were invaded by supporters of whomever is trying to take power. The reason was simple, if you controled the TV signals you controled the easiest means of communications with the people, and one of their few sources of news. You could tell your story uninterfered with, and block the other side's ability to tell theirs.
This is why governments want to control their phone systems, and why they don't really want it to work that well. They don't want it to be too easy for their subjects to communicate with each other, particularlly they're scared somebody's going to discuss the overthrow of those in power. The ability to freely communicate and have at least something that resembles a fair election of leaders is taken for granted in most of North America and Europe, but in other places it's not so easy.
So, by creating a telephone monopoly that makes a half-hearted effort, they've been able to say that they have telephone service for business purposes, while still limiting their people's ability to talk to each other over distance. But, the Internet snuck up on these regimes from behind, and just now they're realizing they forgot to regulate and monopolize it. VoIP isn't that good or reliable compared to well-maintained phone systems, but it's pretty good compared to intentionally mismanaged ones. Competition is usually welecomed because it forces the old monopoly to either perform to the best of its abilities or get out of the game, but this time the monopoly is just crying to the rulers and the rulers see the need to solve this problem the same way they solve any other threat to their ability to stay in power...
VoIP is an idea that looks interesting on the chalkboard but there's no reason for Americans to convert to it when they have an ultra-reliable phone network and pretty good cell phone coverage in populated areas. It's the places that don't have those things that really need VoIP.
Not this time. If that 8 cent dividend were to become a 10 cent dividend, then the expectation is that more 10 cent dividends were to come and the stock would rise. But that's not what this is about... this would be a one-time dividend based on cash that Microsoft has been stockpiling for no particular reason, there's no expectation that this would happen a second time.
If Microsoft does go through with a $1 a share dividend, expect to see the stock drop by exactly $1 the moment it goes into effect.
Why? Because that $1 is moving out of the company and in to the hands of the owner of each share. If I sold you that share before the effective date, that $1 would be within that MSFT share, after the effective date the $1 bill pops out of the stock certificate and can be seperated from it... paying this cash out effectively devaules the company by $10 Billion dollars with 10 billion shares outstanding, so take $10 Billion off the market cap and you're back to $1 per share movement in the price... the numbers all sum back to 0 in the end.
A dividend doesn't actually create wealth or value, it just devides it up... that's where they get the word from.
Microsoft is clearly considering this massive dividend because the recent tax cuts that just went into effect mean that a dividend now will be taxed less than if Microsoft had distributed the money in previous years. Yes, Gates gets to pocket a 10-figure number of dollars out of such a transaction and he really doesn't need the money... but the average american actually owns a few shares of MSFT stock without even realizing it, buried within the mutual fund in a 401k or such.
This could have the same economic effect of a $10 Billion tax cut, dropping money back into play in the American economy where hopefully it'll inspire John Q. Public to spend a little more at the local shopping mall. Alone, $5-6 dollars isn't really going to do this, but if this inspires other companies that have been hording cash for a rainy day to declare a larger-than-usual dividend, that trend could turn your retirement fund's investments around to start facing the right direction again.
Unfortunately, this smells a bit little too much like trickle-down economics, so the odds of this working out perfectly and the way G.W. Bush had on his chalkboard are a bit slim. But at least the first few dominoes are falling as they're supposed to...