What they don't care is the endless growth that MBA guys always try to achieve, and the quarterly profit driven decision making that ultimately destroys their customers loyalty, for short term profit.
A business can be very profitable without being exploitative. It's the people in Wall Street who can't seem to understand this. For them a hundred million dollars of profit is good if last year it was only fifty million dollars, and a dying business if last year it was also a hundred million dollars. It really makes no sense.
I just know that I expect stock prices to go up because most “dividend stocks” give such a small amount of money per share.
If ifs and buts were candy and nuts this would be the cat's pyjamas. I shan't deny it's mathematically elegant, and also feels good in many ways, but the real trouble is it's exceptionally hard to form a watertight argument for an alternative.
Put another way, the appeal of the free market isn't so much in its correctness as it is in its simplicity. I can personally attest that it's sumple enough for any fool to understand, in an area of economics where it's devilishly difficult to establish anything solidly.
I say all this as someone who is a big fan of Valve and their work, deapite otherwise being a foss zealot, just because they throw a bone to our sort.
Dividends are taxed differently and higher than capital gains. So given a choice between a stock buyback and a dividend, often a buyback makes more sense.
This sort of thing is why I think we need heavy taxes to limit wealth accumulation. Money is power, and the amount of power a person with ten+ figure wealth wields is too much for any one person to have, let alone one who was never elected.
The more interesting point is that if you aren't driven by investors to care about short term financial stuff (stock prices) then you can make long term decisions. Caring about your customers is a classic one for this - costs you money in the short term, but in the long term gets you a great customer base.