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Ballmer took home just $1.35M in compensation last year

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wasn't awarded the highest total compensation package in fiscal 2008 - that prize was enjoyed by COO Kevin Turner who raked in a total compensation deal worth $10 million, up from almost $8.5 million last year, according to Microsoft's proxy statement. Ballmer's total compensation was $1.35 million. He has for a number of years declined a larger compensation package but instead prefers to reap his rewards through increasing Microsoft's value. Ballmer owns 4.51% of the company and his slice was worth $10.25 billion as of 4 p.m. PT Monday.

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The Microsoft Subnet blog

By Julie Bort | Bio | RSS
  • Microsoft takes scareware companies to court Submitted by Microsoft Subnet on Tue, 09/30/2008

    Microsoft Monday slapped antiscareware lawsuits against two businesses, Branch Software and AlphaRed, and their product, Registry Cleaner XP, reports Internetnews.com. Scareware are pop-up ads that offer to scan users' PCs for problems and directs users to Web sites where they can download software fixes for payment. Microsoft teamed up with the Attorney-General of Washington State, Rob McKenna to put the lawsuits in motion. "We will not tolerate scams to trick consumers into buying software to solve problems that don't exist," McKenna told reporters. Microsoft said it has seven lawsuits against such scareware.

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  • What Microsoft did to prevent Google from stealing its big customer Submitted by Microsoft Subnet on Tue, 09/30/2008

    Just how far will Microsoft go to prevent Google from stealing its customers? A flight in July from Seattle to Cincinnati, Ohio to Procter & Gamble's HQ by Microsoft's COO Kevin Turner, who persuaded the soap manufacturer to halt its testing of Google's personal productivity software as a potential replace for Microsoft. Turner returned with a bigger three-year contract, reports Bloomberg. "Losing a Procter & Gamble would be something where I don't think I'd sleep well,'' Turner is cited as saying. "I want to make sure that anybody that knows anything about it would also not sleep well.'' Turner promised P&G an early peek at plans for Web-based software and gave the company the flexibility to shift between those and standard applications, reports Bloomberg.

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  • Microsoft is at war and always has been Submitted by Microsoft Subnet on Fri, 09/26/2008

    In the meantime, the company makes money hand-over-fist, manages that cash well, has an enormous eco-system of resellers that helps it do its bidding and that keeps it in the game. While it does often treat its customers with contempt building buggy software and releasing it onto them, its war mentality has more-or-less driven down the cost of software -- and hardware too. We're seeing that right now with VMware.

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  • Will Google be the death of Microsoft? Hard to imagine Submitted by Microsoft Subnet on Fri, 09/26/2008

    Lots of ink these days about how Microsoft wants to eat Google for breakfast and is instead choked on the search giant. Our sister site Google Subnet has even gone so far as to wonder whether Google is Microsoft's white whale and will actually be the death of the largest software maker in the world. While anything is possible, it is hubris on Google's part to think that Microsoft will be catastrophically wounded by chasing a search business. Look at the numbers. True, Google is a strong company with a great balance sheet but it is dwarfed by Microsoft in this regard. Google ended fiscal 2007 with about $16.6 billion in revenues and $5.1 billion in net income from operations (an astounding 31% of revenue converted to profit). That is nothing to sneeze at especially when you consider the company's amazing five-year growth rate. It ended 2002 at about a half billion in revenue. Plus Google is sitting on over $14 billion in cash.

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Microsoft re-releases two patches; Symantec says new Microsoft attack on the rise Microsoft re-released two critical patches on Sept. 16 that were originally included in its Sept. 9 Patch Tuesday. MS08-054 and MS08-053 were both updated to include the Norwegian language update. MS08-054 fixes a hole in Windows Media Player 11 and MS08-053 fixes a hole in Windows Media Encoder 9 Series. (Information about those updates, and others from the September Patch Tuesday can be found...

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