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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: David R who wrote (71395)	7/19/2002 6:41:16 PM
From: jonkai	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74651

I must disagree. MSFT continuously strives to maintain a workforce that is only the top 5% of all potential employees (for each area). To reach this goal, they set the screening to weed out all but the top 2%. really, why exactly are the top 2% of the work force in the US copying the work from other people from other companies who are not in the top 2%? why are they stealing work from people who are not in the top 2%? why are they just plain buying the work from people and other companies that are not in the top 2%? what in the world has these top 2% done lately that they haven't copied or bought or stolen lately? they have 50,000 employees all getting stock options? and what have these 50,000 employees done for a shareholder lately? have they increased earnings? increased the stock price? increased shareholder value? increased anything? i'm talking about the time period when these stock options started to be given out like candy five years ago.... before, only the "top employees" got these options... all employees got options about 5 years ago, and now MSFT even reissued options at even lower prices, and can do it again without a shareholder vote... how exactly is this aligned with a shareholders interests???? what have they done anyway? except fix bugs in an OS that should have been fixed 10 years ago? they showed 63,000 bugs in windows2000 before somebody at MSFT removed the page... (not the bugs mind you, the page) what exactly new innovative stuff have they given us? besides copies of other people's work, that apparently are not in the top 2%...... and those "repriced" options all had the ability of exercising 1/8 of them within one year, and 1/8 every six months after that...... but who cares... they still are all dilutive to the shareholder..... there are all still sitting there like a lid on the stock price..... holding it down tight... how exactly is this good for a shareholder? not to mention the other grant that those were supposed to replace are sitting at even higher levels, making sure the lid is even tighter......... if Alan Greenspan says it quacks like a duck, and Warren Buffett says it quacks like a duck and Arthur Levitt (you know the former head of the SEC, before they replaced him with a yes man accountant) says it quacks like a duck.... then you had better start getting out the binoculars... because you have a duck on your hands...... MSFT is a terrible company in regards to ESO.s 30% of its earnings would be wiped out because there are so many ESO'.s that is not good... the average in the S&P has something like 5% on average of earnings being wiped out because of ESO's... MSFT is in the top bracket of large companies that abuse ESO's soon it will be a mute point because the avalanche of companies changing to what Alan Greenspan says is a better way to show your companies business is coming....

To: David R who wrote (71395)	7/20/2002 6:53:17 PM
From: Dave	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74651

I love this: "MSFT continuously strives to maintain a workforce that is only the top 5% of all potential employees (for each area). To reach this goal, they set the screening to weed out all but the top 2%. The company is built upon the backs of some of the smartest, and most talented people in the industry (and hardest working)." What a festooning crock of feculence! If you simply mean that MSFT employees were in the top 5% of the general populace in terms of engineering skills, marketing skills, and so on, that would hardly be impressive. If on the other hand, you mean as I suspect, that MSFT's software engineers (I'll just talk about the engineers here to simplify things) are the best 5% of software engineers, that's simply unsupportable wishful thinking. Go ask the engineering managers at Sun or IBM or Apple where the most talented software engineers are to be had. I doubt that they'll point you to Redmond. As far as your other implication that employee stock options are the only effective way to motivate talented employees, that's more nonsense. The best engineers are as motivated by the opportunity to do good engineering as by the lottery tickets that we call stock options. If your engineers are motivated primarily by making lots of money (as of course MSFT's obviously are), unless they are a bunch of gamblers at heart, they would uniformly prefer to simply have their salaries doubled. If they are gamblers, they can always put the second half in MSFT stock. Dave