All of the analysts will be updating their projections for AAPL in the morning on the million-iPads a month news (nearly 3 times the consensus opinion), and the news there will not be a significant Windows tablet presence this year to threaten it - giving Apple even more running time to secure the market. It's starting to look like XOM is in danger of being bounced from the top of the hill this year rather than sometime later. Who knows, maybe next week?
Microsoft's projections should get some significant revisions as well.
You know, I've been watching this story unwind for over a year now. Every time somebody comes out with a new Windows tablet the press comes out with accolades and then in all the comments hundreds of people rant about how they want a tablet - any tablet - as long as it doesn't have Windows. "We have MONEY! Take our MONEY!" Some want the iPad, some want the Tegra2 Android tablet. But manufacturers keep announcing Windows tablet designs that are already in the market that nobody is buying.
It's obvious when you think about it. These PC vendors don't have Internet. You guys are going to have to call them on the phone or send them a fax or maybe pay them a visit in person if you want to talk some sense into them.
I hope they make you what you want, for you. I don't see anything shipping before next year though and by then it will be hard to displace the iPad and Android. I doubt there's much of a market for such a thing.
Vendors need product they can ship for Christmas. All the non-AT&T carriers need a product they can carry, and they need it right now. The iPad has just gone over 2 million units in 60 days. A year from now, not allowing for the usual bump for Christmas that's 14 million iPads in the market if they can get them manufactured that fast. 14 million units at a $700 average selling price (a guess) is just shy of ten billion dollars.
At the family gathering yesterday there were about thirty adults there. The iPad came up. Two of them have it already but didn't bring it. All but one person intended to buy one before the end of the year. Anecdote, I know... we're a nerdly bunch.
TG Daily says it's half baked. "Wasn't booting at all."
But at least there's hope for the people who want yet another Windows 7 tablet. Both of them should be real happy with this - next year. Neither tablet will be ready this year.
Humans have a certain morbid interest in the harm others come to driven by our survival need to learn how others come to harm so as to avoid that harm ourselves. We have a socialization empathy instinct to nurture and protect each other for the common good which conflicts with this need. And yet we have a survival instinct to not let the harm that comes to others impede our own survival activities. All of these motivations have simply provable Darwinian merits.
Females of our species are inclined to select against risk averse males because a lack of daring translated long ago to a lack of interest in exploration that was essential to survival in the face of changing environment, social and climatalogical. The lines of the risk averse men and the women who preferred them died out.
These base instincts between morbid curiosity and nurturing protection conflict, and the interface of the conflict is called humor. We are driven to share our understanding of how others came to harm in memorable ways so that others may learn. The interface is persistent and we're intelligent enough that we can construct hypothetical harm stories against it - these are called "comedy". The advantage of comedy is that we can construct cautionary tales rather than historical ones, and noone need actually come to harm. We enjoy comedy because in it we learn how others come to harm without being harmed ourselves, but the closeness to the harm / empathy interface makes the comedy memorable so the closer it is to that interface, the funnier it is.
Having evolved behavioral norms relating to biological activities like reproduction and excretion in the interest of survival, we employ these concepts and the awkward feeling caused by interacting with the interface of the conflicts of these base instincts to create memes which are memorable and which enforce social norms. In the social sense the individual that is the butt of the joke is "harmed" by becoming less desirable for reproduction within our cultural context.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble but if nobody is at least hypothetically harmed, it's not funny. It doesn't approach the harm / nurturing interface that creates the conflict that gives us the "funny" feeling. Sophomoric physical, sexual and toilet humor is all the humor there is. As a proof I invite you to find a "joke" that's "funny" that violates this rule here below. I'm sorry if this post takes some of the mystery and humor out of what was otherwise a quite enjoyable human experience. What is, is.
Because then Allied would have a bunch of profit over and above what it cost them to build it out. Having won good profits that way, don't you think they'd do it again?
There are actually a ton of cheap network-attached HDMI media hubs available. It shouldn't be too tough to use these as network-attached displays controlled by your tablet over wifi. Maybe soon we'll see this sort of thing provided in coffee shops and airports and wherever.
Or you can find out where they're going to put the drops, and build your house next to one of them. Then the "Last Mile" turns into the "Last forty feet".
South pole location is likely because LCROSS found water there last November. Much easier to dig it out of a dark crater than bake hydrogen and oxygen out of rock. Although the robots might base there, they could use a precision catapult to deliver ice anywhere on the moon.
Wouldn't it be great if all those who expect 100% perfection were rounded up and locked in a Klein bottle where they could resolve their issues by the Kilkenny cats method?:
If Microsoft were turning the net profits they've been bragging about this last decade - where are they? Were they lost in the accounting? They certainly weren't returned as dividends - the company's dividends have been trivial. So they have a hundred billion in cash they're not reporting to the SEC? That seems unlikely. It seems more likely that these profits were vapor from the beginning.
The things that separate us from those are market forces. They don't have to give us the cool stuff because our world is populated by the differently abled who will buy the stuff derived from apps Bill Gates built and so pays him royalties. If Microsoft really needed to step up with a solid performant OS, they have a dozen to choose from in the pool of stuff they've developed and licensed, including at least three forms of Unix.
I was thinking I would offer some features an Android tablet might need. I made a list:
Share screen - for educational purposes
Ebook reader.
Internet browser
Citrix client
IRDA capture/replay (media remote control apps)
Skype
Apparently I'm not very creative. Those things and many thousands more are available in the standard package. Truly inventive stuff is offerred in the app store.
I actually agree with you about this in every other case, but Microsoft is a special case. Analysts are already saying that "Failure is not an option." Sigh. I guess we'll have to have one more iteration of this. Here's how it goes:
Normally I'm not one to praise Microsoft's end results, but I'm not stupid. They hire the brightest minds from the best schools with strong foundations in classical IT art as well as contemporary vision and they work them to death because that hazy zone between exhaustion and physical failure is a special point where human brains integrate at miraculous levels. Microsoft has known this for twenty years and organizes its workers accordingly. These folks driven in this way can make an awesome mobile OS, they did, and I'd love to have a copy of the source for that bad boy. These Microsoft developers made a rock solid performant and genuinely innovative phone OS which is the core of Windows Phone 7. It's tiny, boots fast, suspends and resumes instantly, and pinches ergs like they're made of platinum. It has an intuitive touch-centric interface. It works flawlessly with all the latest technologies - hell, it'd make a great HPC OS if these jerks would think out of the box now and then. This was about two years and three reorgs ago. This is the mockup they'll trot out to the major phone vendors hoping to get them to push the platform - short a few apps but you can see the potential because it's beautiful, intuitive, responsive. They built an app store for it, and shopped the mockup around to app developers under NDA. Some of the AC posters here even have it and they're in awe of its incredible flexibility, its power, its potential - and they should be because this bare OS rocks. They float an early 2009 release date to some of their preferred pundits even though it's not finished yet because that's how you feed a flackalyst.
It's a killer mobile OS but it's not a Windows yet. For six months they put some finishing touches on the version they intend to ship - integrating Bing search and Windows Live services into everything, building the Mobile Office apps for it, porting Silverlight,.NET for mobile and a bunch of other stuff. This is leveraging the platform so that it pushes all of the other Microsoft platforms because making products that can be extracted from their internicine application and server dependencies is not the One Microsoft Way. The shipping version then ran like a dog, leaked memory like a seive and crashed every few minutes. So eighteen months ago they rebooted the team and tried again. They got the same result, so nine months ago they reorg the group from higher up and try again. The new group can't get the thing to work right in nine months, so yesterday they reorg the entire entertainment and mobile division to be directly under Steve Ballmer and reboot their efforts yet again. This product was supposed to ship in early 2009. It is not even close to ready. It probably never will be because all of these internicine ties never did work well, are a moving target, and have reached an insurmountable level of complexity for a mobile device which must by definition be the ultimate in computer reliability and stability while remaining cutting edge in a dynamic market. It literally can't be done.
Even today Microsoft executives are shopping around that slick mockup that no end user is ever going to see to their phone partners at the manufacturers and carriers, playing the push/pull game. "You want this. You need this. You're going to want to start planning the marketing around this product right away. This is going to be a slam dunk! And look - it says Microsoft on it everywhere so you know businesses are going to eat it up. [Hushed]It has IE and Outlook." / "Of course, this iPhone killer isn't for everybody - it's exclusive to our special friends. Committed friends l
I think maybe the best answer here is to just surrender. "Mobile? It's not our thing. We wanted it to be our thing - we tried. But we're not good at it." While they're at it maybe they should get out of search and online ads too.
I'm symbolset and the lack of Windows Phone 7 was my idea.
One of these things is not like the other one. Tracking back you can see that over the last decade Steve Ballmer has managed to retain almost half of the company's value over his reign. Steve Jobs on the other hand has built the abandoned-for-dead company he agreed to pilot into great wealth, more than 20x the value of the company he agreed to lead, with enough cash to buy that old company four times over.
Wow, I didn't think I'd have to dig this deep into the thread to find the pointed comment to reply to.
Apple sells servers, workstations, desktops, laptops, tablets, digital video recorders, cellular phones and media devices. In each of those fields they achieve far more margin per unit than any competitor... and yet that's only an introduction to what they sell because each of those things comes with access to a store that's open 24/7 no matter where you are that can add functionality or content to it, and they turn a profit on that as well - in fact, these "blades" constitute far more profit than the "razor" they sold to access and use it. Apple has come to the position of selling access to their razor for blade vendors. Microsoft was in this position once long ago, and worked it for all they could get.
None of this has any bearing on the actual issue of the day, and I'm not going to tell you here. You'll have to either click my userid or scan that relevant coment in the regular course.
Good luck with that. Apple's been a growth company for the last decade and seems to intend to remain so. IBM isn't a growth company, it's in utility mode for more than 20 years turning good dividends but not trying to take over the world. As a result, Apple has more cash on hand today than 3x the entire value of the company 10 years ago and no debt. As a growth company that doesn't dominate most of the segments it's in, Apple's upside potential is huge.
IBM is still a strong conservative investment for folks who want to be confident their investment will grow into enough of an asset to retire on - especially if they reinvest their dividends.
There are several modes for companies, but Growth, Utility and Salvage modes are the commonest. In Salvage mode the folks with the most influence in the company get what they can out of it, and to hell with the common investor. This subsector of corporate governance is quite interesting for the morbidly curious. For companies that have achieved the heights we're talking about it turns into a freeding frenzy where a school of lawyers turn into a feeding frenzy of zombie sharks. It becomes a cancer that affects every company the giant ever touched. The lawyers eventually take conditional fractional options on the success of hopeless suits against unrelated third parties, because what else are they going to do with their idle time - work?
Growth companies pull more PER because they're agressive about growth. Duh. You want some of those in your folder if you're going to retire with something more in your retirement account than you put in.
Microsoft though? One big dividend ever on Bill's retirement from CEO (Coincidence? I think not.), and some symbolic trivial dividends since. Microsoft isn't managed to be a good value for all investors - it's managed to be a good value for a specific set of five investors, all of whom have incidental investments in related companies and who are incidentally on the board of directors. It's clear the company isn't managed for the benefit of the common investor.
Q: If a public company like Microsoft's Board of Directors chose to offload all of the value of a company onto affiliated companies in unwise for the company but wise for the boardmembers deals, how long would it take? A: an afternoon.
Q: How likely is this to happen during the course of my investment? A: Follow the money. Nature abhors a vacuum.
Q: If this huge value transfer happened how soon would it be public information? A: Several months later.
Look, while I agree with some of the basic feeling you've put in here, I can't let this go.
Somewhere up the comment tree is someone with an exceptionally long view: all companies go out of business eventually. Thus, unless a company gives back to investors some profits investors eventually get nothing for their investment. It's true in theory but fortunately capitalism doesn't work that way in practice. Companies can persist for a very long time, change their mode from growth to utility and back again. They can pay dividends, investors can reap benefit from their voting rights or increased access to timely information that being a shareholder provides. They can, through their investment participate in the great things that a corporation can do through pooled capital. Ultimately a well-run company can pay out far more than is paid in adjusted for inflation in addition to the socially useful things they do like build dams, railroads and asteroid mines. Most don't.
You are correct that a "share" is a fraction of ownership of the corportation and so at any point in time is a nominal ownership of this vast pooled capital thing that is the corporation - so it does have point-in-time real value as well as a perceived value in the market. And so you're correct in a way, from a point of view.
But then your metaphor breaks down. Take, for example, Adaptec. Here's a company that has great products that, beset by poor management squandered huge opportunities until it's now being scuttled by an vulture fund. Novell is a future example. Then there's companies that really go off the rails, like SCO, which has taken half a billion dollars in paid-in capital and in their long history only turned a profit in one quarter, and a court later found they stole much of that. Then there are even worse examples, but you get the idea.
Now, that would be a fair comparison to an investment in a bar of gold if your investment were some certificate of shared ownership of a bar of gold in someone else's care. They could steal it. They could lose it. They could hire some fool to mind it. They could throw huge parties with the money you paid for your certificates of ownership (paper or digital) and laugh at what a fool you are and never buy any gold at all. If your investment were on the other hand an actual physical gold bar (or more commonly a stack of well-known gold coins) that was physically in your possession then to lose the actual intrinsic value of your gold they would have to come to where you kept it, overcome your security measures and probably risk some physical harm to their persons without the protection of either lawyers or distance. Now that's not the same thing.
So no, ownership of equities is not similar to ownership of a gold bar - but has some similarity to ownership of shares in one theoretically held by someone else.
Slashdot Mirror
All of the analysts will be updating their projections for AAPL in the morning on the million-iPads a month news (nearly 3 times the consensus opinion), and the news there will not be a significant Windows tablet presence this year to threaten it - giving Apple even more running time to secure the market. It's starting to look like XOM is in danger of being bounced from the top of the hill this year rather than sometime later. Who knows, maybe next week?
Microsoft's projections should get some significant revisions as well.
It looks like Motorola gets it.
You know, I've been watching this story unwind for over a year now. Every time somebody comes out with a new Windows tablet the press comes out with accolades and then in all the comments hundreds of people rant about how they want a tablet - any tablet - as long as it doesn't have Windows. "We have MONEY! Take our MONEY!" Some want the iPad, some want the Tegra2 Android tablet. But manufacturers keep announcing Windows tablet designs that are already in the market that nobody is buying.
It's obvious when you think about it. These PC vendors don't have Internet. You guys are going to have to call them on the phone or send them a fax or maybe pay them a visit in person if you want to talk some sense into them.
I hope they make you what you want, for you. I don't see anything shipping before next year though and by then it will be hard to displace the iPad and Android. I doubt there's much of a market for such a thing.
Vendors need product they can ship for Christmas. All the non-AT&T carriers need a product they can carry, and they need it right now. The iPad has just gone over 2 million units in 60 days. A year from now, not allowing for the usual bump for Christmas that's 14 million iPads in the market if they can get them manufactured that fast. 14 million units at a $700 average selling price (a guess) is just shy of ten billion dollars.
At the family gathering yesterday there were about thirty adults there. The iPad came up. Two of them have it already but didn't bring it. All but one person intended to buy one before the end of the year. Anecdote, I know... we're a nerdly bunch.
I like the Fark headline spin on that article: "If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon."
TG Daily says it's half baked. "Wasn't booting at all."
But at least there's hope for the people who want yet another Windows 7 tablet. Both of them should be real happy with this - next year. Neither tablet will be ready this year.
A theory of humor:
Humans have a certain morbid interest in the harm others come to driven by our survival need to learn how others come to harm so as to avoid that harm ourselves. We have a socialization empathy instinct to nurture and protect each other for the common good which conflicts with this need. And yet we have a survival instinct to not let the harm that comes to others impede our own survival activities. All of these motivations have simply provable Darwinian merits.
Females of our species are inclined to select against risk averse males because a lack of daring translated long ago to a lack of interest in exploration that was essential to survival in the face of changing environment, social and climatalogical. The lines of the risk averse men and the women who preferred them died out.
These base instincts between morbid curiosity and nurturing protection conflict, and the interface of the conflict is called humor. We are driven to share our understanding of how others came to harm in memorable ways so that others may learn. The interface is persistent and we're intelligent enough that we can construct hypothetical harm stories against it - these are called "comedy". The advantage of comedy is that we can construct cautionary tales rather than historical ones, and noone need actually come to harm. We enjoy comedy because in it we learn how others come to harm without being harmed ourselves, but the closeness to the harm / empathy interface makes the comedy memorable so the closer it is to that interface, the funnier it is.
Having evolved behavioral norms relating to biological activities like reproduction and excretion in the interest of survival, we employ these concepts and the awkward feeling caused by interacting with the interface of the conflicts of these base instincts to create memes which are memorable and which enforce social norms. In the social sense the individual that is the butt of the joke is "harmed" by becoming less desirable for reproduction within our cultural context.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble but if nobody is at least hypothetically harmed, it's not funny. It doesn't approach the harm / nurturing interface that creates the conflict that gives us the "funny" feeling. Sophomoric physical, sexual and toilet humor is all the humor there is. As a proof I invite you to find a "joke" that's "funny" that violates this rule here below. I'm sorry if this post takes some of the mystery and humor out of what was otherwise a quite enjoyable human experience. What is, is.
tl;dr
Oh, right. So what keeps it working at night?
Because then Allied would have a bunch of profit over and above what it cost them to build it out. Having won good profits that way, don't you think they'd do it again?
There are actually a ton of cheap network-attached HDMI media hubs available. It shouldn't be too tough to use these as network-attached displays controlled by your tablet over wifi. Maybe soon we'll see this sort of thing provided in coffee shops and airports and wherever.
Or you can find out where they're going to put the drops, and build your house next to one of them. Then the "Last Mile" turns into the "Last forty feet".
South pole location is likely because LCROSS found water there last November. Much easier to dig it out of a dark crater than bake hydrogen and oxygen out of rock. Although the robots might base there, they could use a precision catapult to deliver ice anywhere on the moon.
Wouldn't it be great if all those who expect 100% perfection were rounded up and locked in a Klein bottle where they could resolve their issues by the Kilkenny cats method?:
There once were two cats of Kilkenny
Each thought there was one cat too many
So they fought and they fit
And they scratched and they bit
'Til (excepting their nails
And the tips of their tails)
Instead of two cats there weren't any!
If Microsoft were turning the net profits they've been bragging about this last decade - where are they? Were they lost in the accounting? They certainly weren't returned as dividends - the company's dividends have been trivial. So they have a hundred billion in cash they're not reporting to the SEC? That seems unlikely. It seems more likely that these profits were vapor from the beginning.
The guy who wrote the parent comment is really smart. You should listen to what he has to say.
The things that separate us from those are market forces. They don't have to give us the cool stuff because our world is populated by the differently abled who will buy the stuff derived from apps Bill Gates built and so pays him royalties. If Microsoft really needed to step up with a solid performant OS, they have a dozen to choose from in the pool of stuff they've developed and licensed, including at least three forms of Unix.
Hardware no matter how perfect cannot overcome the deficiencies of software poorly done.
I was thinking I would offer some features an Android tablet might need. I made a list:
Share screen - for educational purposes
Ebook reader.
Internet browser
Citrix client
IRDA capture/replay (media remote control apps)
Skype
Apparently I'm not very creative. Those things and many thousands more are available in the standard package. Truly inventive stuff is offerred in the app store.
I actually agree with you about this in every other case, but Microsoft is a special case. Analysts are already saying that "Failure is not an option." Sigh. I guess we'll have to have one more iteration of this. Here's how it goes:
Normally I'm not one to praise Microsoft's end results, but I'm not stupid. They hire the brightest minds from the best schools with strong foundations in classical IT art as well as contemporary vision and they work them to death because that hazy zone between exhaustion and physical failure is a special point where human brains integrate at miraculous levels. Microsoft has known this for twenty years and organizes its workers accordingly. These folks driven in this way can make an awesome mobile OS, they did, and I'd love to have a copy of the source for that bad boy. These Microsoft developers made a rock solid performant and genuinely innovative phone OS which is the core of Windows Phone 7. It's tiny, boots fast, suspends and resumes instantly, and pinches ergs like they're made of platinum. It has an intuitive touch-centric interface. It works flawlessly with all the latest technologies - hell, it'd make a great HPC OS if these jerks would think out of the box now and then. This was about two years and three reorgs ago. This is the mockup they'll trot out to the major phone vendors hoping to get them to push the platform - short a few apps but you can see the potential because it's beautiful, intuitive, responsive. They built an app store for it, and shopped the mockup around to app developers under NDA. Some of the AC posters here even have it and they're in awe of its incredible flexibility, its power, its potential - and they should be because this bare OS rocks. They float an early 2009 release date to some of their preferred pundits even though it's not finished yet because that's how you feed a flackalyst.
It's a killer mobile OS but it's not a Windows yet. For six months they put some finishing touches on the version they intend to ship - integrating Bing search and Windows Live services into everything, building the Mobile Office apps for it, porting Silverlight, .NET for mobile and a bunch of other stuff. This is leveraging the platform so that it pushes all of the other Microsoft platforms because making products that can be extracted from their internicine application and server dependencies is not the One Microsoft Way. The shipping version then ran like a dog, leaked memory like a seive and crashed every few minutes. So eighteen months ago they rebooted the team and tried again. They got the same result, so nine months ago they reorg the group from higher up and try again. The new group can't get the thing to work right in nine months, so yesterday they reorg the entire entertainment and mobile division to be directly under Steve Ballmer and reboot their efforts yet again. This product was supposed to ship in early 2009. It is not even close to ready. It probably never will be because all of these internicine ties never did work well, are a moving target, and have reached an insurmountable level of complexity for a mobile device which must by definition be the ultimate in computer reliability and stability while remaining cutting edge in a dynamic market. It literally can't be done.
Even today Microsoft executives are shopping around that slick mockup that no end user is ever going to see to their phone partners at the manufacturers and carriers, playing the push/pull game. "You want this. You need this. You're going to want to start planning the marketing around this product right away. This is going to be a slam dunk! And look - it says Microsoft on it everywhere so you know businesses are going to eat it up. [Hushed]It has IE and Outlook." / "Of course, this iPhone killer isn't for everybody - it's exclusive to our special friends. Committed friends l
I think maybe the best answer here is to just surrender. "Mobile? It's not our thing. We wanted it to be our thing - we tried. But we're not good at it." While they're at it maybe they should get out of search and online ads too.
I'm symbolset and the lack of Windows Phone 7 was my idea.
One of these things is not like the other one. Tracking back you can see that over the last decade Steve Ballmer has managed to retain almost half of the company's value over his reign. Steve Jobs on the other hand has built the abandoned-for-dead company he agreed to pilot into great wealth, more than 20x the value of the company he agreed to lead, with enough cash to buy that old company four times over.
I think there was a parable about this.
Wow, I didn't think I'd have to dig this deep into the thread to find the pointed comment to reply to.
Apple sells servers, workstations, desktops, laptops, tablets, digital video recorders, cellular phones and media devices. In each of those fields they achieve far more margin per unit than any competitor... and yet that's only an introduction to what they sell because each of those things comes with access to a store that's open 24/7 no matter where you are that can add functionality or content to it, and they turn a profit on that as well - in fact, these "blades" constitute far more profit than the "razor" they sold to access and use it. Apple has come to the position of selling access to their razor for blade vendors. Microsoft was in this position once long ago, and worked it for all they could get.
None of this has any bearing on the actual issue of the day, and I'm not going to tell you here. You'll have to either click my userid or scan that relevant coment in the regular course.
Good luck with that. Apple's been a growth company for the last decade and seems to intend to remain so. IBM isn't a growth company, it's in utility mode for more than 20 years turning good dividends but not trying to take over the world. As a result, Apple has more cash on hand today than 3x the entire value of the company 10 years ago and no debt. As a growth company that doesn't dominate most of the segments it's in, Apple's upside potential is huge.
IBM is still a strong conservative investment for folks who want to be confident their investment will grow into enough of an asset to retire on - especially if they reinvest their dividends.
There are several modes for companies, but Growth, Utility and Salvage modes are the commonest. In Salvage mode the folks with the most influence in the company get what they can out of it, and to hell with the common investor. This subsector of corporate governance is quite interesting for the morbidly curious. For companies that have achieved the heights we're talking about it turns into a freeding frenzy where a school of lawyers turn into a feeding frenzy of zombie sharks. It becomes a cancer that affects every company the giant ever touched. The lawyers eventually take conditional fractional options on the success of hopeless suits against unrelated third parties, because what else are they going to do with their idle time - work?
Growth companies pull more PER because they're agressive about growth. Duh. You want some of those in your folder if you're going to retire with something more in your retirement account than you put in.
Microsoft though? One big dividend ever on Bill's retirement from CEO (Coincidence? I think not.), and some symbolic trivial dividends since. Microsoft isn't managed to be a good value for all investors - it's managed to be a good value for a specific set of five investors, all of whom have incidental investments in related companies and who are incidentally on the board of directors. It's clear the company isn't managed for the benefit of the common investor.
Q: If a public company like Microsoft's Board of Directors chose to offload all of the value of a company onto affiliated companies in unwise for the company but wise for the boardmembers deals, how long would it take? A: an afternoon.
Q: How likely is this to happen during the course of my investment? A: Follow the money. Nature abhors a vacuum.
Q: If this huge value transfer happened how soon would it be public information? A: Several months later.
Look, while I agree with some of the basic feeling you've put in here, I can't let this go.
Somewhere up the comment tree is someone with an exceptionally long view: all companies go out of business eventually. Thus, unless a company gives back to investors some profits investors eventually get nothing for their investment. It's true in theory but fortunately capitalism doesn't work that way in practice. Companies can persist for a very long time, change their mode from growth to utility and back again. They can pay dividends, investors can reap benefit from their voting rights or increased access to timely information that being a shareholder provides. They can, through their investment participate in the great things that a corporation can do through pooled capital. Ultimately a well-run company can pay out far more than is paid in adjusted for inflation in addition to the socially useful things they do like build dams, railroads and asteroid mines. Most don't.
You are correct that a "share" is a fraction of ownership of the corportation and so at any point in time is a nominal ownership of this vast pooled capital thing that is the corporation - so it does have point-in-time real value as well as a perceived value in the market. And so you're correct in a way, from a point of view.
But then your metaphor breaks down. Take, for example, Adaptec. Here's a company that has great products that, beset by poor management squandered huge opportunities until it's now being scuttled by an vulture fund. Novell is a future example. Then there's companies that really go off the rails, like SCO, which has taken half a billion dollars in paid-in capital and in their long history only turned a profit in one quarter, and a court later found they stole much of that. Then there are even worse examples, but you get the idea.
Now, that would be a fair comparison to an investment in a bar of gold if your investment were some certificate of shared ownership of a bar of gold in someone else's care. They could steal it. They could lose it. They could hire some fool to mind it. They could throw huge parties with the money you paid for your certificates of ownership (paper or digital) and laugh at what a fool you are and never buy any gold at all. If your investment were on the other hand an actual physical gold bar (or more commonly a stack of well-known gold coins) that was physically in your possession then to lose the actual intrinsic value of your gold they would have to come to where you kept it, overcome your security measures and probably risk some physical harm to their persons without the protection of either lawyers or distance. Now that's not the same thing.
So no, ownership of equities is not similar to ownership of a gold bar - but has some similarity to ownership of shares in one theoretically held by someone else.