MS's stock buy back and dividend plan of a few weeks ago struck me as a real change for the company, but not in that "growth has ended" and "maturity is now here" aspect that most people seemed to focus on. The interesting part for me is how this, among other things, fundamentally changes the way that people will make money at MS. I remember at the beginning of Boiler Room, they talked about janitors and secretaries standing next to their ferraris and how cool that was. It was really cool, that basically waiting around at a company would give you all this benefit, especially based just on the growth of the company. I'm not saying they did not contribute to the sucess, but it is clear that at any normal company they would not have made anywhere near as much.
What strikes me is that is not and will never be the case again at MS. Someone who starts at MS and works for 10 years will see the value of their bonuses/options/etc at the end of that time be worth far more than the items at the beginning. This is exactly the reversal of what happened before. MS has always been a culture where even the lowest person on the totem pole was both significant to the process and massively rewarded because of their contributions. In the future, huge stock awards will be the only way to get really wealthy, which shifts the power to the top of the organization. Before, after a few years, you could be very well off, but with the average pay they offer today, employees will spend a significantly longer amount of time before they reach any significant level of wealth.
Mind you this is all hindsight... I'm sure at the time, no one knew what they were giving away, and the people at the bottom felt like they were getting just as much of the shaft as at every other country in America. I wonder what it was like in 1994, when the stock was still on a hockey stick upwards, but there were people who had still been their since 1986 and were already millionaires because of it. I would imagine a real faith at that time that the stock would keep rising forever, or at least long enough so that people who just joined would still have the chance to be millionaires. There's no question that those days are long gone.
[Updated] Made some grammar corrections.
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