Microsoft issues dividends. Google and Apple don't.

Drew,

I use dropbox and I appreciate it, but I find communications from you and Arash to be strangely borderline ... off.

A discussion from three weeks ago is not "an old issue." That these issues made it to the FTC in three weeks is probably a remarkable benchmark.

As Arash did several weeks ago, wrt to the password and key issue, you seem to miss the point and almost intentionally dismiss the issue by detailing it as "old issues."

These issues are anything but old, even in internet time.

I would value Dropbox much more than I do if I found that you and Arash could speak with the integrity I find from so many other entrepreneurs.

I could have written the bit about my grandfather.

He passed away 36 years ago this week and I was already thinking about him quite a bit.

He was the most amazing person I ever met. He came to the U.S. alone when he was 11 years old and lived with strangers until he met my grandmother at a picnic. They were married 3 weeks later. He spoke 5 languages fluently, played 6 musical instruments, never went to school a single day in his life, and he could fix anything.

Like OP, one of my most favorite days of my childhood was when I was 12 and my grandfather took me to work with him. I remember helping him carry his tools down the back steps and load them into the trunk of his Ford Galaxie 500. He taught me my all time favorite cuss word when he said, "Move all that shitcrap out of the way."

Just the other day, I drove right past that spot, stopped, and sat for a while, remembering the good old days. Today, just like OP, I just call someone to get something fixed. I've almost forgotten the joy of getting things done with my hands with the gentle guidance of a master.

Thanks for the memories, Mike Rowe and goldins.

Thanks Paul. I didn't submit this to HN.

But I'll disagree about the news value. The complaint's allegations about what Dropbox promised, versus how the architecture actually works, are pretty strong.

Soghoian knows his tech and he knows the FTC (he used to work for them). I like Dropbox. I use Dropbox. But the blog post Dropbox keeps pointing to doesn't explain the discrepancy between what users were told about security/privacy and how the service works in practice (centralized encryption keys).

Note: I do not hold shares in any of the below companies.

Apple and Google were in their heydays during this time period. If anyone is interested in seeing a really interesting comparison then go to finance.google.com and do the following:

1. Look up MSFT

2. Click "All" for your zoom option, this should give you from 1986 to present

3. Add GOOG and AAPL using the compare box

Now look at the chart. MSFT is up 25,019.04% since it was publicly listed. AAPL is up 11102.07% since it was publicly listed. GOOG is up 394% since it was publicly listed.

If we want to truly assess Ballmer's performance as a CEO using stock performance as a metric then I strongly suggest we look at the past ten and five years of performance of Microsoft and compare it to similar tech companies.

Offhand, I think that IBM and Oracle make suitable comparison points. Looking at the past ten years of performance, we can see that MSFT is down about 27%, while IBM is up 49% and ORCL is up 109%. Now we can more clearly see that Ballmer has more than likely missed some opportunities along the way. When you narrow to the last five years, the picture doesn't change.

I agree with the author of the blog piece - Ballmer has proven to be a mediocre CEO of Microsoft. However, we need to make sensible comparisons to get the point across.

Frankly, I don't understand how MSFT could sit on 40 billion dollars in cash and short term investments without increasing its dividend to something more in line with what one should expect from a mature cash-rich business.

Increasing shareholder value should be the goal of all publicly listed companies. Purchasing Skype for $8.5 Billion dollars flies straight into the face of this - it is a crazy move. Any shareholders that are not screaming about this should wake and smell the sinking share price.

Edited: Formatting in the step-by-step portion of this post was messed up initially...

@asr - I think the OP's point is a bit more subtle than that. He's not suggesting that MS - a large and mature company - should still be growing like companies that only hit their stride recently. Rather, he's noting the degree to which Apple and Google have dramatically outperformed the NASDAQ, citing this as an indicator of how much room to grow the tech sector has had in general.

The real point is that MS has realized none of this potential. Forget lead, it hasn't even followed. Instead of swiftly copying the wildly successful iPhone, they just mocked it, telling everyone that it was a hopelessly niche product. Likewise, the iPad was being written-off by Ballmer as a pointless device with no appreciable market. In reality, it was busy becoming the most successful consumer electronic product of all time.

This goes well beyond a failure of vision. A remark like that indicates total ignorance of present reality. It's a bit like calling Avatar "a flaming fiasco seen by nobody" on the same weekend it breaks a billion dollars at the box office. Coming from the head of a major studio, an assessment that poor would be career-ending.

If your model is imitating others, fine. But you HAVE to be fundamentally aware of what others are doing if you're going to make it work. So if you're demonstrably clueless about what "two of the most successful publicly traded tech companies of the period" are really up to, or why their products are selling so well, you're simply the wrong man for the job.