They have better than 25% operating margin on a company with massive revenue. They're fine, but the shareholders must be appeased with human sacrifice.
Do they? A large chunk of the market is held by retirement accounts. My 401k doesn't care about staplers, and I would very much value long-term gains over short-term savings.
Collectively, 401k holders don't have much of a voice. I suppose Vanguard might, but even so, retirement accounts are specifically balanced such that they have less short-term risk the nearer they come to fruition, and Vanguard's motive, in theory, should be to provide me with better long-term gains, not short-term savings at the expense of a worse retirement.
I think I want to see a stronger argument for "the shareholders" … and/or these sorts of (idiotic) decisions (that we see far more companies doing than just Google; cf the McD's article that trended earlier where McD is laying people off while beating profit expectations!) would seem to fall squarely on bad management.
I've read that activist investors have pushed for this at several tech companies and even heard theories that that's what actually kicked off the layoff avalanche.
If it is actively managed, it cares about a whole lot of things that you don't know about. And if it passively invested, it cares about what the average of the active managers care about.
Collectively, 401k holders don't have much of a voice. I suppose Vanguard might, but even so, retirement accounts are specifically balanced such that they have less short-term risk the nearer they come to fruition, and Vanguard's motive, in theory, should be to provide me with better long-term gains, not short-term savings at the expense of a worse retirement.
I think I want to see a stronger argument for "the shareholders" … and/or these sorts of (idiotic) decisions (that we see far more companies doing than just Google; cf the McD's article that trended earlier where McD is laying people off while beating profit expectations!) would seem to fall squarely on bad management.