The ex-wife of a former Microsoft Corp. employee received $1 million for providing information that helped federal regulators bring an insider-trading case against former hedge-fund titan Arthur Samberg.
With powerful senators watching closely, federal investigators search high and low for evidence of insider trading in shares of Microsoft. One of Wall Street's best-known hedge fund managers is targeted, but the feds can't find proof. Years pass, and they close the case without filing charges.
Nortel Networks, Remington, Eastman Kodak: The list of once-thriving and now-defunct or moribund technology companies reads like the stops on an abandoned railway line. You can add Microsoft MSFT-Q to that list. It’s well on its way to obsolescence. Nothing can be done. It’ll take a long time – decades – but this $200-billion (U.S.) company is finished.
Your attempt to reach the youth via smart phones was an epic failure. KIN has been pulled by Verizon in a matter of weeks. Anonymous purported employees claimed that the IP you bought acquiring Danger are now wasted and call it as embarrassing as Microsoft Bob. Joe Wilcox correctly predicted Kin’s failure as you fired the leadership of the Entertainment and Devices division just before the Kin product launch.
“Microsoft's stock barely moved because while Microsoft could easily deceive the press, it could not quite deceive shareholders who do this for a living.”As we pointed our earlier today, it's about hardware sales for the most part, especially after a highly recessionary year. "Microsoft profit beats Street, stock unmoved," heralded The Star. Is anybody surprised? Microsoft always beats expectations because it sets the expectations low and if business is not doing well, then Microsoft does in fact revise the expectations (so that it will beat them later). We wrote about this several times before and explained how financial jargon is being used to obscure the simple truth. We gave current examples. Microsoft's stock barely moved because while Microsoft could easily deceive the press, it could not quite deceive shareholders who do this for a living. "Microsoft Shares Slip Despite Earnings Beat" -- that's the headline from the Wall Street Journal. It's not so rosy after all, not based on the financial market anyway.
So anyway, what could have caused Microsoft to push unimpressive results (which did not impress shareholders on the face of it)? We have already explained how Microsoft fudges the numbers and plays with an accountant's toolbox, which is probably not illegal.
In the next part we will take a look of one of the latest culprits which is responsible for poor performance. That would be "KIN", which failed to compete against Linux (perhaps outsold by Linux at a ratio of 1:~15,000 on any given day). In the third part of this series we will look at the impact of Google and Free software on Microsoft. ⬆