The Ballmer Days Are Over
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The Ballmer Days Are Over
1–10 of 218 posts
Re: The Ballmer Days Are Over
#2"just for the sake of others not owning it."
Perhaps this is why it's worth $8.5 billion to MSFT and not to others. It's pretty silly to say someone got a bad deal a week after they bought it. If Ballmer has some awesome plan for it that will require a year or two to implement it would behoove him to disclose this so that others could move competitively to destroy the value from such a purpose.
Re: The Ballmer Days Are Over
#3Sure, Microsoft could have built a skype clone in-house for far less than $8bn. But would people actually sign up and use it - to the tune of 124 million people per month? My guess is no, at least not for several quarters.
Re: The Ballmer Days Are Over
#4Microsoft is entering what Jim Collins would call the 4th stage of decline: Grasping for salvation. Unless something changes dramatically very soon, I wouldn't be placing my bets on Redmond.
Re: The Ballmer Days Are Over
#5The world will be a little better off with a decline of Microsoft. 90% desktop market share is too much. More diversity will be healthier. Chromebooks should take some market share. Microsoft can own 50-70% market share and still be very profitable. They might even be more innovative in other areas.
Re: The Ballmer Days Are Over
#6Microsoft issues dividends. Google and Apple don't.
Re: The Ballmer Days Are Over
#7Microsoft issues dividends. Google and Apple don't.
Thank you. It never ceases to amaze me how many people fail to realize that you need to correct for dividends (One time, and otherwise) when calculating market cap.
Re: The Ballmer Days Are Over
#8"just for the sake of others not owning it." Perhaps this is why it's worth $8.5 billion to MSFT and not to others. It's pretty silly to say someone got a bad deal a week after they bought it. If Ballmer has some awesome plan for it that will require a year or two to implement it would behoove him to disclose this so that others could move competitively to destroy the value from such a purpose.
Why's it silly? He's buying a commodity business (thats what VOIP is) for 32x earnings.
There's a reason M&A is often referred to as a winner's curse -- because winning the bidding typically means overpaying. The synergies execs often talk about almost -always- fail to be realized.
Shareholders of Microsoft would have been much better off if the company just bought back $8.5bn in stock. A dividend would have been out of the question due to tax repatriation issues.
Re: The Ballmer Days Are Over
#9Sure, Microsoft could have built a skype clone in-house for far less than $8bn. But would people actually sign up and use it - to the tune of 124 million people per month? My guess is no, at least not for several quarters.
Agreed, Microsoft didn't over pay for the software, they over paid for the user-base. The user base is what you want.
Re: The Ballmer Days Are Over
#10Sure, Microsoft could have built a skype clone in-house for far less than $8bn. But would people actually sign up and use it - to the tune of 124 million people per month? My guess is no, at least not for several quarters.
Exactly. Now I decided to stop using Skype.