.... with things like hedge funds and what not will often setup shop in countries with less strict security laws than the US in order to avoid legal and accounting overhead as well as to be able to provide products that would be illegal or cost prohibitive in the US. US investors are often barred from these instruments. Some companies will form offshore corporations in order to invest in them.
Bottom line: There a lot of reasons to have foreign subsidiaries beyond tax avoidance/tax optimization.
Java may be great to program in, but it cannot compete with.NET in a large environment. I spend the same amount of time screwing with fifteen different and conflicting version of the JRE for one program distributed to three users than five.NET programs distributed to one hundred users. Larger java webstart applications are the downright devil when they're cached into a user's windows profile and it's only recently that Sun instituted a buggy implementated system cache.
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.... with things like hedge funds and what not will often setup shop in countries with less strict security laws than the US in order to avoid legal and accounting overhead as well as to be able to provide products that would be illegal or cost prohibitive in the US. US investors are often barred from these instruments. Some companies will form offshore corporations in order to invest in them. Bottom line: There a lot of reasons to have foreign subsidiaries beyond tax avoidance/tax optimization.
Did anyone bother to read the 10-Q Microsoft released today? Or any analysts viewpoints? Or is it more exciting to pull analysis out of your behind?
Accounting firms do not want more regulation. Why? Look at Arthur Anderson's self implosion. Big Four are already streched entirely too thin.
Java may be great to program in, but it cannot compete with .NET in a large environment. I spend the same amount of time screwing with fifteen different and conflicting version of the JRE for one program distributed to three users than five .NET programs distributed to one hundred users. Larger java webstart applications are the downright devil when they're cached into a user's windows profile and it's only recently that Sun instituted a buggy implementated system cache.