Guys? Okay, guys? (Photo: News.au)

Today was Apple's annual shareholder meeting, an occasion for CEO Tim Cook to spend some time kicking it with the folks who own their own little slices of the company. AllThingsD reports that, as you might expect, the subject of the company's drooping stock (malingering at $449.13, far from last fall's great heights) was broached. And no, Tim Cook (who apparently has a 99.1.% approval rate from shareholders) isn't totally pleased with it.

According to AllThingsD, he told the audience:

“I don’t like it either,” he told attendees at Apple’s annual shareholder meeting today. “The board doesn’t like it. The management team doesn’t like it.”

Cook urged patience, saying that if the company continues to focus on making great products, revenue and profit will follow. “What we are focused on is the long term; this has always been the secret of Apple,” he said, adding that the company has “some great stuff” in the pipeline.

Otherwise, sounds like Apple saves most of the entertainment value for those endless tent-revival press conferences: "As far as corporate theater goes, Apple's (AAPL) annual shareholder meeting Wednesday was ZZZZZZZZ," said the San Jose Mercury News.

Well it can't all be iWatches and Apple TVs, guys.

(Photo: Rizzn)

Even a dorky-looking pair of Google Glasses won't be able to hide the disdain on Google CEO Larry Page's face today. Reuters reports that the company's financial printers, RR Donnelley, accidentally filed a draft of the company's Q3 earnings results to the SEC. "PENDING LARRY QUOTE," reads a placeholder at the top, indicating that the results were filed accidentally, before Mr. Page had a chance to chime in and defend the 20 percent dive in net income.

Company earnings are typically filed before or after trading hours to reduce the immediate impact on stock prices. As of this writing, Google's stock had dipped 9.03 percent, though it's still hovering around $687.

In response to the accidental filing, Google said that RR Donnelley had filed the earnings without authorization. "We have ceased trading on NASDAQ while we work to finalize the document. Once it's finalized we will release our earnings, resume trading on NASDAQ and hold our earnings call as normal at 1:30 PM PT," the company said.

As for the earnings, RR Donnelley told Reuters that it's still working to finalize the statement, but things don't look very promising for the internet giant. The purchase of the underperforming cell phone manufacturer Motorola Mobility may have crippled Google's performance this quarter. According to Reuters:

"Google, which has been struggling to turn around a loss-making cell phone maker Motorola Mobility that it bought for $12.5 billion, reported a 20 percent dive in net income to $2.18 billion. Excluding certain items, it earned $9.03 a share, vastly underperforming the $10.65 analysts had expected, on average.

'Click prices declined for the fourth consecutive quarter after rising for eight consecutive quarters before then. That's a negative. This is the mobile problem,' [said an analyst].

'The other bit is the Motorola millstone had been ignored by the market, and – boom – now you've got weak revenue from Motorola. When you acquire a business and you're about to whack all kinds of people and close offices, you know what happens to the employees? They take their eye off the ball. Sales are down.'"

In RR Donnelley's defense, we're not sure Mr. Page can do much better than "PENDING."

(Photo: The D Networks)

It's been almost four months since Facebook's alarmingly botched IPO, and yet its specter still haunts the markets. On Friday, $FB stock closed at $18.06 a share, dropping a sharp 5.40 percent in a single day--the worst drop a tech company experienced that day. (Comparatively, Zynga--which has been widely panned for its parachuting stock--only dropped 3.11 percent.) To date, Facebook has lost $50 billion in market value since its IPO.

And yet, despite much talk of banks and underwriters and Facebook's nascent leadership team, we've yet to pin down a real target for our IPO ire. Luckily, Dealbook's Andrew Ross Sorkin thinks he's found the likely culprit: Facebook CFO David Ebersman, whom you've probably never even heard of:

And yet if there is one single individual more responsible than any other for the staggering mispricing of Facebook’s I.P.O., it is Mr. Ebersman. He signed off on the ever-increasing offer price, which ended up at $38 after the company had originally planned a price range of $29 to $34.

He — almost alone — pushed to flood the market with 25 percent more shares than originally planned in the final days before the offering. And since then, as the point person for investors, he has done little to articulate how or why the company’s strategy will lift the stock price any time soon.

According to Dealbook, Mr. Ebersman is ultimately guilty of buying into his own hype about the price of Facebook's stock. Following a roadshow, it's typical for investors to indicate that they're interested in purchasing two or even three times more stock than they end up actually getting. Mr. Ebersman, writes Dealbook, "did not seem to appreciate what was happening. They seem to have believed their own hype and took those orders as real, giving them the misplaced confidence to push the I.P.O. to the highest possible price and issue more shares."

So what will happen to Mr. Ebersman? Nothing, so far. As Dealbook points out, Zuck told employees following the IPO: “So, you’ve heard we’re firing David?”

He was just joking. Heh.

Plotting? (Photo: flickr.com/joi)

Zynga just closed at 3.06 per share. The good news? That's not an all-time low, as it dipped below $3.00 in July. However, it's hovering at dismal levels, compared to the schadenfreude-inspiring state of Facebook (19.15).

But let's put that in real dollars, shall we? A single share of Zynga is now worth fewer American greenbacks than a Shake Shack milkshake ($5.00), a Sunday New York Times (also $5.00) and the Metrocard cost of a trip to Coney Island and back ($4.50).

$3.00 isn't going to get you much in the way of virtual items, either.

However, it is still possible to assemble a decent meal off the Wendy's 99-cent value menu for less than the cost of a share of Zynga, provided that you are not very hungry.

Ride the wave

There has been plenty of talk in recent weeks about internet IPOs and the danger of trying to ride that roller coaster. Many stocks saw a huge rise on their first day or week, followed by a steep fall.

But over at Fortune, Kevin Kelleher points out that this kind of swing in momentum seems to effect tech stocks well outside the bubble.

He notes that New York based OpenTable, which went public in May of 2009, enjoyed a great climb to $118 in April of 2011. But over the last eight months the company has lost 67 percent of its value, settling at a little under $40.

It's not that there has been a fundamental shift in how OpenTable's business is doing. It's just that internet stocks are prone to periods of huge growth and become favourites among momentum traders.

As the companies mature, this growth slows down, and that's when the share price takes a plunge. " It doesn't take a stock bubble on the scale of the 90s dot-com mania for investors to lose money on a supposedly hot Internet stock."

Betabeat doesn't see what all the fuss about. Investors could also have taken a bath in the last two years investing in financial stocks or trying to predict the price of oil. Are internet stocks more volatile than the rest of the market? Typically. But that's the tradeoff for explosive growth.

We're all in this together...until we're not

The big news yesterday was a piece in the Wall Street Journal which reported that Zynga was demanding stock back from early employees in the run up to their public offering. Employees were being threatened with termination for refusing to rescind their equity.

The WSJ story stated that Zynga executives said they didn't want a "Google chef" situation, referring to a cook who joined the search engine early on and had $20 million in stock after the IPO. Zynga CEO Mark Pincus released a memo later in the day which found its way into the hands of Fortune's Dan Primack, that gave credence to this:

Team,

The wall street journal posted a story last night (copied below) which paints our meritocracy in a false and skewed light.....Being a meritocracy is one of our core values and it's on our walls.  We believe that every employee deserves the same opportunity to lead. Its not about where or when you enter zynga its how far you can grow. This is what our culture of leveling up is all about and its one of our coolest features.

we want everyone to put zynga first and contribute to the overall success of our company and all of you have.

thanks,
mark

The memo contradicts itself, of course. If everyone at Zynga has put the company first and contributed to its overall success, then why all the talk about a meritocracy that rewards some staffers over others? How exactly does Zynga keep score in their meritocracy and decide which employees have leveled up enough to deserve the stock they were offered to sign on?

A senior software engineer who was an early employee at Google wrote a post in defense of the early employee, no matter what position they hold. He pointed to this infamous "Google Chef", Charlie Ayers.

"I have no idea what Google's deal with Charlie was, but typically you take a pay cut for a shot at the brass ring. Charlie didn't make $20M for cooking, he made $20M for taking the risk that the company he was joining would fail and that he could end up five years older, unemployed, and with nothing to show for his trouble.

But it is not Zynga's failure to grasp this basic fact of startup economics that bothers me, it is their singling out of Charlie in particular because he's a chef. As someone who was there in the early days I can tell you that Charlie Ayers contributed more to Google's success that I did, and I was a senior software engineer."

Anyone who goes to work at a startup is taking a gamble, no matter what their position. All the different parts of the business have to work together for a company to function at a high level. Unless Zynga can directly refute the WSJ article, this is going to make it very difficult for them to sign top talent in the future, no matter what kind of worker they're looking for.