I wish it were that simple but I find your analysis highly flawed. The early employees, founders and investors risked a big chunk of their resources and hence played a huge part in the creation of the company and are all the beneficiaries of those buybacks assuming they stick around for that long.
Quick Service Restaurant industry one of the most competitive. The reason why they were able to increase productivity and product quality might be because when you focus on a few core metrics like serving time and food prices it doesn't come at the expense of productivity but because of it.
Maybe the only thing common between Instagram and Oculus is the investor (Andreessen) and the acquirer (FB)..oh and that Mark Andreessen was a board member during both the acquisitions!
I think (and a lot of other would agree with me on this) that the Xbox division within Microsoft is the most customer-centric of any company in the entire world.
The people at Xbox are die hard gamers who really want to help you solve your problem whatever it might be. I don't know if spinning off one of the best divisions would be such a smart division specially when it is already profitable, unlike Bing.
That's probably one of the reasons why Amazon has been undercutting almost everyone time & time again. With their razon thin margins they have nowhere to go but up. Even when they don't go down as much as the markets think they would their stock goes up.
Other retailers & technology companies don't have that luxury. They can't lose money at the cost of margin contraction or market share expansion. Heck, they can't lose money at all the way Amazon has been doing since its inception!
It's high time Bezos repeated the "Steve Jobs's mistake". Not that Amazon shareholders want them to.
"Management teams of well-run companies spend very little time thinking about the formal financial statements."
Not true at all. Well run companies do spend a lot of time in preparing their financial statements. First, it is required by law, see - Dodd-Frank, Sarbanes-Oxley, etc.
Second, it can get well-run companies with good intentions into a lot of trouble with the SEC and investor lobbying groups.
Sure, it's something the CFO thinks about, but it isn't really something that plays a factor into decisions about how to run the business for other C-level executives.
