I'm no fan of Bill Gates. I think it's dumb how I have to call Microsoft every other time I do a reinstall of Windows, because their lame anti-piracy tools never work correctly. And Microsoft shows no signs of slowing this trend either. Mark my words they will put themselves out of business if they keep treating their customers as piracy suspects. But that's not what this is about. This is about Wall Street; a group of thugs that makes Bill Gates look like a saint.
For those that pay attention to the market, you know that Microsoft's stock fell by quite a large amount. And if you really pay attention to the market, you've probably asked: why so much loss? It's not like the company is losing money.
If you don't follow the market then you probably already know the answer: the market is a scam. And of course it is. But it's a damn good one. The fact is ... investors pulled their money out of Microsoft because Microsoft was investing its money in its future, rather than its stockholders. No sir they don't like that. They'd rather see short term profits, even if it means rotting the company from the inside to get those profits.
Now I already said I'm not a fan of M$, so what's the big deal? The thing is, M$ is primarily a software company. They make hardware too, but much of their hardware, like the Xbox 360, is priced to sell at a loss. Software is where they expect to make their money. And software takes people to write it. Sometimes an unfathomable amount of people. Possibly even too many, in the case of Windows. And they are investing even more money to compete with google, and that means more jobs. Sounds like a good thing to me, all in all.
But according to Wall Street it's a bad thing. So the vultures had to pick away over 10% of the company's value overnight. This sort of things happen every day. It makes me wonder if there might be some sort of cumulative effect. Whatever it is it can't be good.
But anyway, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to be a sell another piece of your soul (and make a little money) by buying M$ while its cheap. They are still making money and are about to release a new OS and many consumers are going to be moving over to 64 bit. Their stock should go back up.