Microsoft once was a company, with ravenous employees working to change the world. It was led by Bill Gates and it depended on his cult of personality.

Today Microsoft is a simple industrial company. They just announced a 48% increase in quarterly profitability. All of it came from their legacy products - Windows and Office. All of their other efforts are losing money. Bing for instance saw its quarter loss widen from $585 million to $696 million. Their consumer entertainment and devices division's loss widened from $141 million to $172 million. Finally they have made no headway, in the fastest growing market of mobile computing.

Their CFO provided all of the commentary on the quarter results. Peter Klein commented "we're very aware of how important it is to do well on Windows Phone". When your CFO is left alone to make excuses; that is a tell-all sign that an old cult of personality, can't be substituted with a generic CEO.

Microsoft can't attract top entrepreneurial talent anymore. Why? Because that type of talent comes from a belief in the future value of stock options. Microsoft stock is not going to ever go up. It will take a long time to die. But it can't grow with the times because it is just a "sausage factory" that only makes one good sausage.

Microsoft has only two responsible options for their shareholders. One is to dividend it's cash creation to its shareholders and the second is to use their cash to buy other cash generating software companies and increasingly issue better dividends per share. The irresponsible thing to do is status quo - 15 years and counting of pissing money away, trying to copy more entrepreneurial sausages with salaried non-entrepreneurial sausage makers.

Which begs the question from this author. When Apple has only thrived by a cult of personality of Steve Jobs in the 1980s and again in the late 1990s and today, what happens when he leaves?

I suspect that the answer will come when their new CEO, lets their current CFO make all of the announcements and commentary in quarterly reports.

- John Jazwiec