Stonehenge drive-by today on way to friends I’m staying with in our old village nearby. People come from all over to see Stonehenge, and this shows you how most locals see it, if they bother to look. I used to drive by it all the time. Usually, I looked :) (Taken with instagram)
HL-10 Lifting Body, but I always think of it as the Steve Austin plane :) #nasasocial (Taken with instagram)
We call this the Google boat, but they’re just a sponsor. It’s a tender to the Virgin Oceanic submarine. Which is never around. (Taken with instagram)
The key aspect of Google’s earnings yesterday was the don’t-call-it-a-stock-split stock split. I say “don’t-call-it-a-stock-split” because it technically wasn’t one, but it was effectively one. There will now be double the number of Google shares outstanding. It’s just that the shares won’t all be equal. Half of them will be of a different type of class, which is important when it comes to company governance. Those shares will carry no voting power.
I’m not going to pretend to understand all of the intricacies here. But I think Felix Salmon has the most interesting take on the news. He flat-out calls the maneuver evil.
He notes that for much of the 20th century, dual-class voting shares were illegal. And even when they came back in 1986, the idea was to have protections in place. The majority of independent shareholders (so, non-management and non-directors) were supposed to approve such a move.
But Google didn’t see to that. Instead, they appointed a small committee of independent directors (so, just those that don’t actually work at Google) to make the call on the proposal. And because that committee approved it, it will now go before all the shareholders for a vote in June. And, notably, that vote will include Google’s management.
| — | Danny Sullivan, If Google’s Really Proud Of Google+, It Should Share Some Real User Figures (via marketingland) |
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