ERICOPOLY

It would have wiped out Berkshire Hathaway, so you aren't joking when you say "everyone".

Why not use their foreign cash to buy back their shares on the foreign market, would that be considered as repatriated money by the IRS? BeerBaron I almost said the same thing, but then figured they would already be doing that were it possible. Because CSCO which loves to buy shares back would have done that with the foreign cash pile and paid dividends with the domestic one.

My idea of what they should do is this: 1) Borrow at low rates to buy back shares (they are AAA so they get the best rates) in tender offer (they've done a large tender offer before) 2) Keep an offsetting amount of cash overseas They can always pay the loan off later on, for example, when the US govt eliminates the excessive tax on repatriated earnings. Can't hurt. It's not like it's risky in any way. Even if they don't lift the tax on repatriated foreign earnings, the spread they'll make on borrowing cheap to buy shares will cover that tax after just a few years if they need to pay off the debt with that foreign cash. They likely would be borrowing at interest rates similar to JNJ quality companies, so they could use their foreign cash to buy such bonds and the earned income would wash out against what they'd be paying out in interest. Given the lower foreign tax rates on that income vs the tax deductions at higher US rates, this might even work out to positive net interest income.

Why wouldn't you want the cash in your own hands? I think someone like me benefits by having a smart person make my decisions, but some of you guys are bright and talented.

What is the dirt on him? I feel like I should know. His biography (per Microsoft): http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/bod/rgilmartin/

He is a very poor judge of Gates if he thinks a little publicity will get Ballmer out. Gates has a high amount of integrity and won't make a move like that just to please a small-time hedge fund manager that is just in it for a trade. Gates is a very good judge of character, for example he has said that Buffett is his best friend. Speaking of his character, the MSFT board says something good about BofA. The CFO is on the Microsoft board, somebody looking at BofA might like to know that, because as a "black box" it's nice to know that the CFO reporting the numbers is somebody that Gates trusts. EDIT: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/bod/noski/

I don't think it takes much to get under yours. Sincerely, you take this all the wrong way. It's all very lighthearted, just as you found it necessary to get unprofessional with the "evil" comments. I'm sure you didn't mean anything by it, it's just fun to throw out there. People are just human, you can't expect others to always behave with comments that don't get down to the level of yours. Both just antics. However, the game is on when a corporation makes it their motto to mock another. That has got to be the most adolescent motto in all of the business world. So people tease them, people say it's hypocritical. Maybe change the motto to something more mature, like the one you suggested. It makes more sense now that the company has grown. I'm not sure that a single other company has a motto that swipes at another one.

I am not saying that I am taunting. I am saying that Google was taunting (but they were just adolescents at the time, so the maturity can be forgiven)... and they will get (and have been) taunted back because of it. For example, as you mentioned Steve Jobs makes fun of it. And Bill Gates jokes "Do less evil".... etc... It's just all in good fun... don't get uptight. Making fun is one thing. Trying to get under someone's skin is another. When you say that someone is a hypocrite, that's a little bit more than good-natured ribbing. That's the way I take it, at least. I said the culture is one of hypocrisy. "culture" of a company is not the same thing as insulting a someone. People have said Microsoft is evil -- that is not an insult to a specific "someone". Perhaps you are just realizing that as a part of an organization, you feel a bit slighted personally when the organization is denigrated. Lesson learned, one that I learned way the hell back when I joined Microsoft. It's probably new for you, but if they keep going down that path of things you disapprove of, then you'll get used to it.

I am not saying that I am taunting. I am saying that Google was taunting (but they were just adolescents at the time, so the maturity can be forgiven)... and they will get (and have been) taunted back because of it. For example, as you mentioned Steve Jobs makes fun of it. And Bill Gates jokes "Do less evil".... etc... It's just all in good fun... don't get uptight. People will say this and that at Google are "evil", but only because it's their word thrown back, but it's playful teasing. A cross town rivalry if you will. UCLA vs USC. Stanford vs Cal. I mean, even alumni still joke about that kind of stuff long after the day -- but it's not serious.

That would be better. The don't be "evil" was clearly a swipe at the "Evil" Empire. Thus, be prepared to have a thick skin. It's one of those perfect "those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" situations. Taunting people... they might taunt you back.

Here is one way to put it where it's not biased with anti-competitive slant. Rich client-side applications could be developed using .NET. In theory. Supposedly, Microsoft could save a lot of money writing Internet Explorer, Office, etc... apps in .NET. Then they could have a single codebase and ship it on every platform that they ship the .NET runtime engine on. However, one of the most critical pushes on the IE team was for performance. So it would never fly. Never for a moment would they consider writing it in .NET. That would be a performance nightmare -- relatively speaking compared to just writing it in C++. Honestly, they is no way in hell any development manager would consider that even for a moment. On servers though, it's terrific for getting many things done, just like Java.

Regarding Java. I mentioned that I actually never used Windows at all until 1995. I started at UCLA in fall 1995 and graduated in 1997 when I joined Microsoft. UCLA was very anti-Microsoft. The computer science lab was full of Sun workstations (donated by Sun), and I took a Java programming course there in Fall 1996 (from the mathematics departement). So I did get a good dose of Java, in a pro-Sun environment, during a time when I'd only had 1 year of Microsoft software under my belt. It was easy to program in, but you could only make relatively lame user interfaces that were really slow. My instructor of Software Engineering (course title) was an employee of the Rand Corporation -- he literally told the class not to work for Arthur Anderson or Microsoft. I also grew up near Palo Alto and the mother of a good friend worked for Sun when I was in high school. I had a positive feeling about that company until I was exposed to Scott McNeally through the media. My mother met him in the late 1990s when I was already at Microsoft -- she was an RN in Labor & Delivery at Stanford University Hospital (retired now). His wife was having a baby, and while she was in labor he spent the whole time taking calls and chattering on about a deal HP was going to make with Microsoft. What a prick! That's what all the nurses thought of him. I am firmly behind Steve Jobs on this one. I haven't done it on the most recent versions of Flash, but if you just go to pretty much any Flash website and enable Microsoft's "Application Verifier" tool on the iexplore.exe process, you'll get crashes just by refreshing the page. They might have fixed that by now (it's been 4 years now), but it was something I always struggled with when attempting to find IE bugs (I relied on the Application Verifier tool to catch memory corruption). So my stress automation software would always disable all of these third party addons. The browser active x components are a plague. They run in the IE process, and if you disable them the competitor will cry foul. And people will just assume you are anticompetitive (like you suspect of Steve Jobs). We were highly motivated to have the third parties fix the bugs -- they were not as motivated to fix them. After all, "An Application Error Has Occurred in Iexplore.exe". People just blame it on IE. Jobs doesn't want people to think they are Apple's bugs, which they most likely would do. App Verifier turns on flags in ntdll.dll, so the memory allocator behaves in a sort of debug mode. You can set it on a per-process basis: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms220931%28v=VS.90%29.aspx It does things like put heap allocations on the end of pages, and mark the next page PAGE_NO_ACCESS. So if code tries to write beyond the allocation, it's an instant death for the application and you can catch it in the debugger. Without those flags turned on in the process, the corruption happens and the application may or may not crash later on (impossible to find out the code that caused the corruption). That AppVerifier tool has been publicly available for more than a decade. These third parties have absolutely no excuses for their lame crap -- why can't they just fix their bugs? They don't have to. Unless Jobs puts the screws on them. It not a game of "you have a bug somewhere, go hunt for it" -- not when it's handed over on a silver platter. From A River Runs Through It Jessie: Why is it the people who need the most help... won't take it? Norman: I don't know Jess.

I can't say this is a compelling reason against owning them -- isn't this taught in the chart watcher school of stock picking? Of course, the show is called Fast Money after all. Over the last 10 years, while the Nasdaq Composite Index rose about 34% and the Standard & Poor's 500 Index 8%, Microsoft has slumped 25%, Intel 15% and Cisco 12.5%. "That's where money goes to die - all three of those stocks. I have no reason to own them," OptionMONSTER co-founder Jon Najarian told CNBC during a discussion of the trio's long history of poor returns.

LOL. My 5 year old loves Star Wars. And, even though he hasn't seen the movies (aside from the new animated series), he already knows that Han shot first. I wonder if our schools make it clear to children when the USA shoots first.

That's interesting (just watching the video now). I think however that if someone takes a critical view of what is written in certain religious texts, similar points can be made. A supreme being that will punish you if you do not worship him -- isn't that vanity? Or intolerance of alternative lifestyles? The reader books on Star Wars are actually pretty good at explaining the moral underpinnings of the force. How anger leads to the dark side, etc... In fact, I view Star Wars more as a spiritual guide now more so than ever -- because prior to having children, I'd never read the books, only the movie. I"m just talking about the children's reader books: level 1, 2, 3. These are not the original novels. Maybe the fathers in that video helped write the books.

We should probably stop this discussion TxLaw. A little bit of humor on closing: Accepting the Evil Empire analogy, I will introduce a new one: Google is Anakin. (sorry, I have small children and read them Star Wars books every day): Anakin: "Something's happening. I'm not the Jedi I should be. I want more. And I know I shouldn't. " ... Anakin: "I shouldn't have done that. It's not the Jedi way. " ... Obi-Wan: "You were the chosen one! It was said that you would destroy the Sith, not join them. You were to bring balance to the force, not leave it in darkness. " ... Obi-Wan Kenobi: Anakin did not take to his new assignment with much enthusiasm. Mace Windu: It's very dangerous, putting them together. I don't think the boy can handle it. I don't trust him. Obi-Wan Kenobi: With all due respect, Master, is he not the Chosen One? Is he not to destroy the Sith and bring balance to the Force? Mace Windu: So the prophecy says. Yoda: A prophecy that misread could have been. Obi-Wan Kenobi: He will not let me down. He never has. Yoda: I hope right you are.

Well, I've already seen you post on how Microsoft killed Java's promise of "write once, run anywhere". If it's not your impression then where did that come from? And you wrote the following (I'm adding emphasis to the key section): Oh, and if you're Netscape, you better use our proprietary APIs or we're going to dominate you by making sure that all businesses have to rely on IE because we know that once business start developing websites for IE, it will be more difficult for future businesses to ignore IE and all the other MSFT standards that are tied to IE. The reason why I brought up the LAYER element, is that once a website was authored for these Netscape specific features it would only look good in Netscape! So they were certainly playing the same game. It's just how the game was played. However you clearly implied that "if you were Netscape", as if they were being harmed! They were throwing web standards bombs too! It was just all out war. Fully agree. The sad thing is that "they" completely overreacted (it was probably only a few key executives at the top). Well you play the "they're evil" part so well I just figured you were 100% lawyer. Apologies. Relax, it's playful teasing based on the "do not evil" mantra. Google make it their culture, but then they utilize government resources to prosecute disingenuous arguments. That's not a benefit to society, it's taking advantage of public resources to gain an edge over a competitor. It's doesn't sit well with me, not an example of good business ethics. This is where Val's point comes home -- eventually principles are compromised, it just seems to happen. They also acquire other companies and then force the legacy user base to use GMail (which is completely unnecessary inconvenience to YouTube users). Look, fine you are just taking it from the Microsoft playbook. But then you're not evil, right? It is heavy-handedness, not "let the best mail win" behavior. I don't accuse Google of doing anything worse than Microsoft, but that's not the "Do NO evil" standard they've set for themselves. It's not about openness when you tell your friends that if they don't play your game then you'll pack up the toys and go home (which is what forcing GMail on YouTube is all about). It's not based on whether or not Microsoft has done worse... they never had a "do no evil" code. Anyhow, you could say they have to resort to these tactics in order to survive in the tech world, but then you're no longer above the fray. You're down in the gutter with the trash. So it becomes the pot calling the kettle black. Thus, I view "do no evil" as hypocrisy. Years down the road, Google's success may land them in antitrust proceedings. Their behavior of abusing their YouTube monopoly to gain a stronger foothold in mail will just be color against a background of anti-competitive behavior, all patterned around protecting their search dominance. Just like the one-off violations that Microsoft did were all cobbled together into "anti-competitive behavior". Okay, so why does "do no evil" really bother me. I guess there is a parallel with how I view religion. I am not religious, and I have nothing against it. I do have a serious problem with self righteousness. That's what gets me going. It's all well and good if they really walk the path of enlightenment, but when they stray it's open season when they don't drop the self-righteousness.

It was Google pushing them to do it: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2009/02/reuters_us_google_microsoft This is why I just see Google as a culture of hypocrites. Just compete. Make a better product and shut up (I wish I could just be dictator). Firefox had huge share in 2009, and growing: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/0/04/20091208190055!Web_browser_usage_share.svg Google's frustration is that they wanted instant share. So they have this disingenuous argument that the browser market isn't competitive, despite IE's share clearly declining rapidly even though it's preinstalled! And yet you argue that Google is just making the internet easier to use? Hah! Right. An OS without a web browser REALLY makes it easier to use, right? Yah sure, because IE is so hard to use. Google is not a culture of hypocrites. Many if not most of the people who work there believe in doing the right thing, and there are a lot policies and positions that Google takes at a higher level that the people there really disagree with, based on discussions I've had with Googlers. Internal debates are encouraged. I disagree with Google piling on against MSFT in the EU. But Google has started to do stuff like that in order to fight against the dirty tactics used by evil Microsofties who will justify anything as long as it lines their pocketbooks (tit for tat hybperbole, okay?). IE may not be hard to use, but it is stuck in the past and keeps the Web from being what it could be. MSFT has no incentive to innovate to the fullest extent with regards to IE because of the competitive threat that the Web poses as an alternative platform. So, yeah, I absolutely think that Google is making the Internet easier to use. It's disingenuous to argue otherwise, and only a Microsoftie would attempt to make that argument because of their blind rage towards Google. I do find it interesting hearing your viewpoints on this, as most of this took place before your time. I think it was shaped on rhetoric, the idealism of cliches like "write once run anywhere". I believe you are under the impression that Java was a suitable client side technology. You also seem to imply that Internet Explorer stood in the way of the web being based on standards. What you probably aren't aware of (not being an engineer) is that Netscape was not based on standards. Look up the "layer" element for an example of this. The IE team had to play catchup with Netscape, and because important websites rendered in Netscape in a given way we had to emulate their behavior. This occasionally required deliberately copying their bugs so the pages would lay out the same. Later, after Netscape had passed, some of the criticism heaped on the IE browser was rooted in some of those compatability hacks! Ironic, worth a laugh but not much else. EDIT: It is also difficult to fix one of the compliance bugs when a major customer had written a complicated application based on earlier Internet Explorer. Do you just fix the bug and break the customer's code? No, you don't, which is why a later version of the browser (IE7 or IE8) had an option of loading the webpage using the IE6 rendering engine. Other browsers just fix bugs and break customers -- Microsoft owes a good deal of bloatware to customer care. Apple will need to learn about this if they ever intend to be the defacto corporate desktop technology. Here is your browser based on web standards "Netscape 4" (or do you agree that was just a bunch of hot air?): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layer_element And you probably don't just take my word on it, so here is an example of what they would try to rush to market after two more iterations: http://oreilly.com/news/flanagan_1100.html You can be certain that earlier versions were far worse, but this says it all about version 6: I'm writing to express my dismay at the number of standards-compliance bugs that remain in the Navigator 6.0 code base, and at the end of this article I'm requesting that like-minded developers register their comments and sign their names in protest.

It was Google pushing them to do it: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2009/02/reuters_us_google_microsoft This is why I just see Google as a culture of hypocrites. Just compete. Make a better product and shut up (I wish I could just be dictator). Firefox had huge share in 2009, and growing: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/0/04/20091208190055!Web_browser_usage_share.svg Google's frustration is that they wanted instant share. So they have this disingenuous argument that the browser market isn't competitive, despite IE's share clearly declining rapidly even though it's preinstalled! And yet you argue that Google is just making the internet easier to use? Hah! Right. An OS without a web browser REALLY makes it easier to use, right? Yah sure, because IE is so hard to use.

Actually, one of the big reasons I enjoy the MacBook is that it didn't have all that OEM garbage installed on it. It's so lame that my HP laptop has their own update software -- Microsoft already has a Windows Update where HP can refresh their drivers if they'd just take advantage of it. Instead, there's all their monitoring software on there, and it's constantly wanting to check for updates, etc... What a mess. And none of this matters anyhow. People understand now that web browsers belong with the OS preinstalled -- Microsoft was just early (Apple appears to have copied their lead here). And all the companies preinstall their own browser. Nobody cares, browsers are free on all platforms, Microsoft or not. IE only ships on Windows, there are tons of browsers on other platforms now and people actually use those platforms. People can make browsers and charge for them on Chromebook laptops, but nobody will because there is no market for it. Netscape simply had a model that was a flash in the pan -- they took a free product and then copied it and tried to sell it. It failed initially because of Microsoft, but again Google doesn't look like they try to sell their browser on non-Microsoft platforms either. Just as evil I suppose if making a free browser is evil. Personally, as a consumer I'm happy when somebody gives something away.

I get your argument that monopolies are bad. I'm wondering though why it means a company is no longer able to design their own consumer experience. This is why I'm asking if it's open season for DELL to reconfigure the crap out of Apple's OS user experience once Apple is dominant. I'm betting not. I think psychologically it was easy for people to swallow this "Compaq has right to alter Windows experience" line because people couldn't imagine a Microsoft product without an OEM like Compaq or Dell building the box for them. Letting in the third party OEMs was like letting in the mafia. My viewpoint is that you've come to swallow the narrative because of the history behind these OEMs and Windows. I think most people who supported it would have found it absurd if these OEMs had never previously built Windows machines. In Apple's case, they don't yet have third party OEMs building the machines for them... so mentally people would never swallow that leap to saying all of a sudden that Compaq or Dell can just come along and start installing their buggy apps all over it. I have Comcast service. It's a Motorola set top box. Should the courts order Comcast to allow Motorola to stick their tawdry links to apps all over the user interface, just so Motorola can make a few bucks off of the product placement? That's all the OEMs wanted -- they want to stick these ugly icons all over the desktop because they get paid to do so. It's a big revenue opportunity for them.

Every now and then an executive does something foolish and throws his company under the bus. I remember after the Windows 2000 launch seeing Scott McNeally on camera evangelizing Linux, begging everyone to buy Linux instead of Windows 2000. Trouble is, he was trying to sell Sun products, desktops and servers. But he told them to buy LINUX, not his own products. I think LINUX hurt Sun more than it ever hurt Microsoft.

In the beginning, they were not a monopoly. I mean, way back in the beginning Microsoft made software for Apple because Wozniac was lazy! (floating point Basic) Later on, you are saying that once they become a monopoly Compaq or Dell can modify it. Okay, so let's say Apple wins and in 10 years time Apple has the OS share that Microsoft has today. Can DELL then just take Apple to court for not being allowed to ship MacOS on DELL branded hardware, with all of DELL's software preloaded? Big ugly 8 pound laptops with battery-draining, power-consuming DELL services running wild? Slowing down the boot experience? And then hanging on shutdown, forcing people to cold power off the PC?

You are working from the premise that altering Windows experience is a right. It was allowed to happen for a long time, and then everybody just sort of assumed the OEMs had this right because they'd been doing it all along. Microsoft from day one should have told them not to change anything on the desktop, but they're free to use whatever hardware they choose. Truthfully, the reason why I hate all that OEM install is that I had to go through the process of wiping every machine clean when I'd get it at Microsoft, and then painstakingly installing the OS again (which usually involved searching the web for drivers). Pain in the butt. And the reason? Because those OEM images were so full of bugs, that we'd need to get them out of the way so that we could accurately know a bug was ours when we found one during automated testing (and it's not meaningful to have your apps crash left and right on OEM bugs when you're really hunting for IE bugs). Apple after all never allowed 3rd party OEMs to even install their OS! They still don't.

Precisely. And yet the government thought it terrible that Microsoft wouldn't let the OEMs do this or that. Those OEMs only exist in the first place because Bill Gates is no Steve Jobs. Imagine a world with no choice of PC hardware -- personally, I think that's where the OEMs belong, hardware differentiation only. Microsoft should be allowed to control the look and feel of the Windows experience as it's their IP. And that includes reducing desktop icon clutter as they see fit.