True, this is a big part of it. However to calculate return people should also consider the dividends that Microsoft has been paying out as well (for longer than many competitors).

Starting on Jan 23rd 2009 (which is when the chart you linked to starts for me) an investment of just under $10K (with reinvested dividends) would leave you with just over $30k today [1] which is honestly not a bad return.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/investor/Stock/StockSplit/stockcalc...

Sure that makes it outperform the S&P 500 over this arbitrary period, but still falls short from the other companies. It makes more sense though to look at it since he became CEO[1] in January of 2000. Now we see a huge difference with MSFT the only one in negative territory and the other companies having massive returns. Reinvesting dividends over this period would push this into positive territory, but it still wouldn't even outperform the S%P 500 (22.57% vs 34.99%).

[1] https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

The stock only increased by ~125%. Microsoft only started paying 3% dividends a few years ago. This does not add up to over 30k. It's barely 24k.

Anyway, I do agree it's not a bad return. It's only bad relative to the other tech giants.

I am not a big fan of Microsoft. But how many companies do I know which have grown revenue year after year for FORTY* years? Must give this man (and Bill) credit, for that is a near impossible task.

* Except a couple of near misses.

Yes, the stock price reflect poor performance, but be aware that going forward, focusing on the near-term stock price is precisely the wrong thing to do. The investments the company needs to make will take many years to play out, and the shareholders will need to be patient.

How did you make that chart please? Specifically, the percentage on the y-axis -- how does one get that? Thanks.

If you add more than one stock to a Google Finance chart, it should automatically change the y-axis to %.

Merci.

Very interesting chart. MS matches Dow Jones almost exactly in recent years. NASDAQ did usefully better. On that evidence there's not much reason to invest directly in MS.

> On that evidence there's not much reason to invest directly in MS.

That's a sign of a mature company. There are reasons to invest in companies like that (safety and dividends, for example), but they don't include high growth potential.

Microsoft is part of the DJIA so it should not be too surprising that their movements are pretty well correlated