Why did Steve Ballmer sell 12 percent of his stake in Microsoft?

But what if the share sale signals something else? It's a hefty volume, and Ballmer isn't done. He plans to sell about 75 million of his 408 million shares by end of year. That means about another 25 million share sales are coming; he owns 358,911,338 shares following last week's three sales. Has Ballmer lost confidence in Microsoft? Perhaps his confidence problem is with Wall Street, which as I explained yesterday would be justified; Microsoft's stock is moribund below $30. Gasp, could it be that Ballmer is on the way out, and he is unloading now ahead of time? Many Betanews commenters and investors posting elsewhere have demanded Microsoft dump Ballmer. Or could the sale simply be Ballmer rewarding himself for Microsoft's 2010 performance -- the old self slap on the back? Another: Ballmer's huge sale came right after the U.S. election. Perhaps he sees Republicans taking over the House of Representatives and split government as being bad for businesses like Microsoft.

Well said! Can I say having just come back from Europe that the windows 7 phone is laughed at over there in fact they sell them with a background of the windows blue screen for a laugh

If he's not confident & wants to get out, his timing doesn't make that much sense. One would assume he'd sell after the demand for Kinect and Windows Phone 7 was realized. MSFT is up today, and it'd be up more if he hadn't sold, meaning that he could have held & made even more dough. No big conspiracy here.

U.S. Wireless network operators AT&T and T-Mobile began selling their first three Windows Phone 7 devices today: the Samsung Focus, HTC Surround, and HTC HD7. These are the first of ten Windows Phone 7 launch devices to be made available to United States customers

New Galaxy S smartphone called the Continuum

Samsung today announced a new Galaxy S smartphone called the Continuum, which breaks adds a secondary "ticker" screen beneath the main one, which can be activated simply by gripping the phone.

More than six months after the Skype 5.0 beta came to Windows machines, the popular VoIP, IM, and video chat client has been updated on OS X.