Summary: Microsoft is losing money, paying its CFOs a lot of money to shut up after they depart, and now a guy from Microsoft becomes the CFO of Puppet

A COUPLE of years ago Puppet invited me to interview their executives and even sent a signed book. The company also sent many E-mails, hoping to receive some positive coverage from us (we declined because we never do this). I personally work a lot with Puppet and I am thankful for what it does (even at no cost), so the news in [1] troubles me greatly. It basically says that the CFO will be a guy from Microsoft, the company which engaged in serious financial fraud, got caught after an insider blew the whistle, and then paid the Feds to walk away (so basically another Enron, but one that got away with it). According to this new article, "revisiting the SEC filing from late October makes it clear the company [Microsoft] also spent more than it made then."

Well, the company is said to have lost 18 billion dollars in 1998 alone. It's seemingly some kind of Ponzi scheme, relying on government protectionism and collusion (e.g. with the NSA, whose secret/black budget may somehow subsidised the acquisition of Skype through familiar proxies). Citing the above article, iophk said, "hence the current noise about revenue... a distraction from the losses." ⬆

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Puppet Labs pairs open source entrepreneur with Microsoft exec

   New Puppet CFO Bill Koefoed is leaving the executive suites of the world’s largest software company, where he ran Microsoft’s investor relations department for four years before taking over in 2012 as CFO of its Skype subsidiary.