On March 27, 1998 I started at Microsoft. At that time my Stock Option strike price was 21.95. I remember that because when I left the company in 2004, that was my first grant of Options that was about to expire.
The interesting thing to notice is that Microsoft is trading on the 22.5-22.9 range today (it did it last week as well). Can you imagine?
Here is some surreal data... If the stock reaches:
- 21.87 (9/30/02) it will be the 5 year low
- 21.68 (12/29/01) it will be the 6 year low
In other words... Tough days for Microsoft.
Now, I do wish the stock to go up, up, up. A lot of my friends work there and they will make an extra buck if the stock goes up.
I can't really tell when that happened, but 2 years ago you could go to https://google.com and get all your searches over HTTPS. Good for the paranoid about the government snooping on your ISP (hey, that is happening!).
Today I tried and they redirect to http://google.com (without the 's').
The only reason that I see for them doing that is to preserve CPU, since the SSL consumes between 10-20% more CPU than non-SSL responses.
On a different company, similar topic, on MSN Search (https://search.msn.com) you get the message that "this service is currently unavailable".