A magic window for Microsoft's cash problem

Microsoft lost one of its top engineers to Google, and chief executive officer Steve Ballmer was not amused. "F---ing Eric Schmidt is a f---ing pussy. I'm going to f---ing bury that guy," he said of Google's CEO, according to allegations made in court documents. Then he threw a chair, or so the story goes.

Yes, they're a sensitive bunch at the world's biggest tech company, not so much because they're losing talent as whythey're losing it. Microsoft is said to have created 10,000 millionaires, most of them staff who received stock options in the 1980s and 1990s. But the company doesn't give options any more, having donned the governance hair shirt a few years ago. Now it gives stock instead, a program that is turning its newer employees into, er, thousandaires.