Wall Street seems to be whipping up an angry mob ready to storm the Redmond Bastille and guillotine King Steve Ballmer.
Wall Street analysts and fund managers are furious that Vole's share price is as mobile as a sleeping elephant and King Ballmer is sitting on a bulging cash hoard telling the shareholders to eat cake.
Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, who has been ordering a halving of the company's share price in his 11-year tenure, met with Wall Street and investors and totally failed to mention doing anything nice for them.
One fund manager, who had earlier identified Microsoft's use of its $53 billion cash hoard as the most important issue facing investors, told Reuters that he wanted to see more of a bank dividend.
Microsoft currently pays a 2.5 percent dividend. It is not bad but given there is all that cash it seems a bit Scrooge-like for Ballmer to sit on it.
The company is expected to raise its quarterly dividend modestly next week but has shown no indication that it will bow to investor demands to double its dividend.
Chief financial officer Peter Klein said returning cash to shareholders was one of the company's main goals, however, he failed to mention when he was going to do that.
Part of Vole's problem is that most of its cash is sitting overseas and it can't pay shareholders without being taxed to the skies.
Ballmer ignored a call by hedge fund manager David Einhorn. He called for his removal and the sale of the online services unit, including Bing. The unit has lost more than $6 billion in the last three years.
Ballmer has said that he was not selling Bing or dropping the slow-growing smartphone business.
He said that he did not love where Microsoft was, it just had to "kick this thing to the next level." It's like throwing chairs up the stairs.
Lots of hardware swing to bring on entire new genration, like -=7=- only complete. of course, entire system is in hundreds per....
yet thats fun of entitlements.coda' selectra....
telcoJO:Look At 'Em GO:....
vondrashek .Tetris FREE for 2 Days....
Why/when subsists owt from nowt? (at least in my lifetime). Don't life profer the former? The law of diminishing returns? How would you assess the identity of a Cosmic Pearly King?
My, this spot of tea is something.
<snort>
Privileged observers are waving betwixt the past and future whatever goes for the present...
Secret chief officers are moonlighting as quantum mechanics, but it is all cleverly hidden from our view.
The question of what money is doing whilst not observed is meaningless, and it only takes a Reductionist's view and the next thing you know, you pay more taxes than the people who work for you and that is just not right. The metaphysical implications are that these secret handshakes would instantly create a perfectly deterministic universe compleat with requisite Heffalump in the oval on billiard-cloth green and munching the carpets, whilst mee-maw and paw-paw are flinged under the special relativity of a bus.
The hedge-onomy not withstanding, the supraliminal solipsist-ontology which is needful of ponzied bagholders of greater Fooltopia doing that crazy.
Bring us our daily alms, and we promise to keep Crimbo up with the Joneses. It is tremendously expensive to force the Cloud to make a star, guv.
Ballmer should be fired by the stockholders for his arrogance.