Something to consider: if you'd bought Microsoft stock at its IPO in 1986, at $21/share, you would have experienced stock splits amounting to 288:1 from then to the present day. If I'm doing the math right, then each of your original shares, purchased at $21, would now be paying you $103.68/year in dividends. (And, the market value of each of those original shares, today, if there weren't any stock splits, would be $7712.) Sure, you had to wait nearly two decades for the payout, but getting 5x your original investment as a dividend, every year, sounds like a hefty reward. If you ignore the dot-com market bubble, the long-term chart of Microsoft's stock shows a remarkably steady growth in its price, which is fairly easy to justify, given the present dividends.