Came across this news through my friend and as usual, just thought of sharing with you.
ESOPs benefits not taxable at source: SC
The Supreme Court has ruled that the benefit given to the staff of a company under the employees' stock option scheme cannot be considered as taxable income and the company was not obliged to deduct tax at source.
The court thus dismissed the appeal of the Commissioner of Income Tax, Bangalore against the judgment of the Karnataka high court which had ruled in favour of Infosys Technologies.
The company had created Technologies Employees Welfare Trust and allotted 7.5 lakh (750,000) warrants at Rs 1 each. Such warrants could be used after a five-year lock-in period to obtain shares. The plan was floated because of buy-back problems where employees left their jobs for one reason or the other. The stock exchange was informed that the shares were non-transferable.
The tax authorities, however, determined that the total amount paid by the employees while exercising their option was Rs 6.64 crore (Rs 66.4 million) whereas the market value of those shares was Rs 171 crore (Rs 1.71 billion). The difference was treated as 'perquisite value' on which TDS was charged at 30 per cent.
The company was treated as a defaulter for not deducting the perquisite value of Rs 165 crore (Rs 1.65 billion). The tax tribunal and the high court, however, held in favour of Infosys [Get Quote] when it moved the courts.
Dismissing the appeal of the tax authorities, the Supreme Court bench headed by Justice S H Kapadia ruled that the company was not bound to deduct tax on the amount earned by its employees from exercise of stock option granted to them through the trust.
"Warrant is a right without obligation to buy. Therefore, perquisite cannot be said to accrue at the time when the warrants were granted," the judgment explained.
The employee could resign, and there was no certainty that his option would be exercised after the lock-in period. "The benefit if any which arose on the date when the option stood exercised was only a notional benefit whose value was unascertainable."
The change in law introduced in the Finance Act in 2000 was not retrospective, the court asserted. The benefit was prospective and unless a benefit was in the nature of income it was not taxable. There was no legislative support to consider the benefit given in this case to the employees as income chargeable under the head 'salaries', the judgment concluded.
Monday, January 07, 2008
Bill Gates says:
"People are often curious about which applications and technology I use, and if there are features in the new version of Office that have changed the way I work. Without a doubt, Office 2007 enables me to get my work done more easily and quickly than before.
If you visit my office, you will probably notice right away that I have three large flat screen displays that sit together and are synchronized so they work like a single very wide display. The large display area enables me to work very efficiently. I keep my Outlook 2007 Inbox open on the screen to the left so I can see new messages as they come in. I usually have the message or document that I'm currently reading or writing in the center screen. The screen on the right is where I have room to open up a browser or look at a document that someone has sent me in e-mail.
I spend the majority of my time communicating with colleagues, customers, and partners. As a result, Outlook is the application that I use the most. I receive about 100 e-mail messages per day from Microsoft employees, and many more from customers and partners.
It's very important that I hear what people think about our products and our company. Yet I need to balance that against the very real risk of information overload from all the e-mail that I receive. The advances we made in Outlook 2007 for filtering, rules, and search folders have made it much easier to manage my e-mail than before, especially because so much happens automatically once I've set everything up.
A great thing is that all my voice mail, faxes, and even instant messages are sent to my Outlook Inbox using our unified communications technology. Another important feature of unified communications that we have integrated into Office applications is presence and identity. That means I can always tell at a glance whether the person I need to get in touch with is available or not.
One change to Outlook that I appreciate is tasks are now integrated with how I view my calendar. Before Office 2007, I never used the Outlook task feature, but now that tasks are automatically added to my calendar, it makes it much easier to stay on top of the important things I need to do.
Working with other people efficiently and effectively is more important than ever, not just for Microsoft but for any organization. I find that SharePoint, a software program that enables people to easily create internal Web sites so they can collaborate on projects, has become indispensable.
For example, each year I do something called ThinkWeek where anybody in the company can submit a paper about an idea they have to change the way our company works or to pursue a new development project. We used to rely primarily on printed documents, but now it's simple for us to create a Web site to manage the entire process. This year, more than 350 papers were submitted. Not only did I read and comment on many of them, but other technical leaders from across the company were able to go up to the ThinkWeek Web site and add their thoughts. This has led to many lively discussions and started numerous new projects, something that was much harder to do when everything was on paper.
This release of SharePoint also has many social networking features that I find enormously helpful. In addition to searching any corporate intranet site for documents, SharePoint now enables me to search for specific people based on their expertise, job title, or the department they work in. Also, employees can easily create personal Web sites where they can post photos and list their experiences and interests. SharePoint even automatically associates every document with its author, and explains his relationship to other employees on the same team and in his department. So SharePoint makes it far easier to quickly identify the two or three people who are experts in parallel computing, for example, even though there are more than 80,000 employees at Microsoft now.
Of course, collaborating often means meeting with my colleagues in person or remotely over the Internet via Office LiveMeeting. I always take a lot of notes about ideas to think about or things to follow up on. I try to bring my Tablet PC to meetings as often as possible so that I can use OneNote 2007 to write notes in ink that can later be searched or converted to text. Even if I forget my Tablet, I can scan a document or piece of paper and add that image to OneNote. One of the nice new features in OneNote 2007 is that it automatically recognizes the text in those scanned documents, so that it's easy to search for them later.
Then there are times when I really want to drill down into an industry or market trend. The new business intelligence and data visualization tools in Excel 2007 and SharePoint are fantastic for accessing the kind of data that used to be hard to find because it was stored in back-end databases, and then dig through that data to gain some real insights into what is going on. Now I can easily take a look at how a change to something like our assumptions about customer demand might affect the market for a certain product.
Taken together, the improvements in Office 2007 have certainly had a large impact on the way I work. I seem to discover a new feature or a better way of doing something almost every day, and I am hopeful that many of you will find the new Office to be as useful as I do".
About the author
William (Bill) H. Gates is chairman of Microsoft Corporation, the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
On June 15, 2006, Microsoft announced that effective July 2008, Gates will transition out of a day-to-day role in the company to spend more time on his global health and education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. After July 2008 Gates will continue to serve as Microsoft’s chairman and an advisor on key development projects.
Under Gates' leadership, Microsoft's mission has been to continually advance and improve software technology, and to make it easier, more cost-effective and more enjoyable for people to use computers. The company is committed to a long-term view, reflected in its investment of approximately $7.1 billion on research and development in the 2007 fiscal year.
"People are often curious about which applications and technology I use, and if there are features in the new version of Office that have changed the way I work. Without a doubt, Office 2007 enables me to get my work done more easily and quickly than before.
If you visit my office, you will probably notice right away that I have three large flat screen displays that sit together and are synchronized so they work like a single very wide display. The large display area enables me to work very efficiently. I keep my Outlook 2007 Inbox open on the screen to the left so I can see new messages as they come in. I usually have the message or document that I'm currently reading or writing in the center screen. The screen on the right is where I have room to open up a browser or look at a document that someone has sent me in e-mail.
I spend the majority of my time communicating with colleagues, customers, and partners. As a result, Outlook is the application that I use the most. I receive about 100 e-mail messages per day from Microsoft employees, and many more from customers and partners.
It's very important that I hear what people think about our products and our company. Yet I need to balance that against the very real risk of information overload from all the e-mail that I receive. The advances we made in Outlook 2007 for filtering, rules, and search folders have made it much easier to manage my e-mail than before, especially because so much happens automatically once I've set everything up.
A great thing is that all my voice mail, faxes, and even instant messages are sent to my Outlook Inbox using our unified communications technology. Another important feature of unified communications that we have integrated into Office applications is presence and identity. That means I can always tell at a glance whether the person I need to get in touch with is available or not.
One change to Outlook that I appreciate is tasks are now integrated with how I view my calendar. Before Office 2007, I never used the Outlook task feature, but now that tasks are automatically added to my calendar, it makes it much easier to stay on top of the important things I need to do.
Working with other people efficiently and effectively is more important than ever, not just for Microsoft but for any organization. I find that SharePoint, a software program that enables people to easily create internal Web sites so they can collaborate on projects, has become indispensable.
For example, each year I do something called ThinkWeek where anybody in the company can submit a paper about an idea they have to change the way our company works or to pursue a new development project. We used to rely primarily on printed documents, but now it's simple for us to create a Web site to manage the entire process. This year, more than 350 papers were submitted. Not only did I read and comment on many of them, but other technical leaders from across the company were able to go up to the ThinkWeek Web site and add their thoughts. This has led to many lively discussions and started numerous new projects, something that was much harder to do when everything was on paper.
This release of SharePoint also has many social networking features that I find enormously helpful. In addition to searching any corporate intranet site for documents, SharePoint now enables me to search for specific people based on their expertise, job title, or the department they work in. Also, employees can easily create personal Web sites where they can post photos and list their experiences and interests. SharePoint even automatically associates every document with its author, and explains his relationship to other employees on the same team and in his department. So SharePoint makes it far easier to quickly identify the two or three people who are experts in parallel computing, for example, even though there are more than 80,000 employees at Microsoft now.
Of course, collaborating often means meeting with my colleagues in person or remotely over the Internet via Office LiveMeeting. I always take a lot of notes about ideas to think about or things to follow up on. I try to bring my Tablet PC to meetings as often as possible so that I can use OneNote 2007 to write notes in ink that can later be searched or converted to text. Even if I forget my Tablet, I can scan a document or piece of paper and add that image to OneNote. One of the nice new features in OneNote 2007 is that it automatically recognizes the text in those scanned documents, so that it's easy to search for them later.
Then there are times when I really want to drill down into an industry or market trend. The new business intelligence and data visualization tools in Excel 2007 and SharePoint are fantastic for accessing the kind of data that used to be hard to find because it was stored in back-end databases, and then dig through that data to gain some real insights into what is going on. Now I can easily take a look at how a change to something like our assumptions about customer demand might affect the market for a certain product.
Taken together, the improvements in Office 2007 have certainly had a large impact on the way I work. I seem to discover a new feature or a better way of doing something almost every day, and I am hopeful that many of you will find the new Office to be as useful as I do".
About the author
William (Bill) H. Gates is chairman of Microsoft Corporation, the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
On June 15, 2006, Microsoft announced that effective July 2008, Gates will transition out of a day-to-day role in the company to spend more time on his global health and education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. After July 2008 Gates will continue to serve as Microsoft’s chairman and an advisor on key development projects.
Under Gates' leadership, Microsoft's mission has been to continually advance and improve software technology, and to make it easier, more cost-effective and more enjoyable for people to use computers. The company is committed to a long-term view, reflected in its investment of approximately $7.1 billion on research and development in the 2007 fiscal year.
I came across this article and thought that I should share it with you…….It’s about the mistakes that the employees of Microsoft commit…….
Even Microsoft employees are not immune from the everyday pitfalls and mistakes that everyone is bound to make at work. Read Philip Su's hilarious take on how some of us Office "experts" make the same mistakes our customers do ... over and over again.
A question I frequently get from all my readers (yes, both of you!) is, "What's it like working at Microsoft?" Most people imagine that life at The Big One must be like working in a Geekalicious Nirvana. Everyone wears 3D goggles ("It's a Unix system! I know this!") and goes by handles like Crash Override and Acid Burn. Specifications are written in I33t. DeLoreans equipped with Mr. Fusions are the cars of choice. That sort of thing.
When I tell strangers that I work at Microsoft, I see the gears turning in their heads as they contemplate their next question. Inevitably, they ask one of the following:
"Have you been in Bill's house?" Usually, it's the 12-year-old in the bunch that asks this. No, I have not, but I have been on his lawn. Yes, all interns were invited; no, I did not talk with him; yes, I gorged myself on free food. None of this is half is interesting to the stranger, however, as the story of the intern who was forced out of Bill's house in handcuffs after running in during a "bathroom break" to make a phone call to his mom. "Hi mom! You'll never guess where I'm at right...ow! OUCH!" But I digress.
"Wow — can I drive your Ferrari?" This is a perennial favorite with the provisional driver's license crowd. They quickly lose interest once I fondly mention my '98 Honda Accord (V6! Too fast! Too furious!).
"Hey, my Outlook's not working…" "I don't understand the thing in Excel where you [verb] the [noun] with your [relative/neighbor] using [ctrl/alt/shift][F7/Enter/NumLock]..." It's a veritable MadLib of questions of the pattern, "In [Microsoft product of choice], how do I [some important thing that should be easy to do but isn't at all obvious]?"
The last type of question is by far the most common, especially with the airport crowd. But these strangers base their questions on a critically-flawed premise: They assume that Microsoft employees actually know how to use Microsoft products.
So without further ado, and to show you that we struggle with technology just like everyone else, here are the Top 7 Microsoft Employee Bungles using Microsoft Office that I've witnessed.
Top 7 employee bungles using Office
1. Opening dangerous attachments. Viruses like Melissa ("I love you!") were a huge problem at Microsoft. The kicker about it is that everyone acted flabbergasted and incredulous. "What sort of idiot clicks on these things?!" It's like Hootie and the Blowfish: the best-selling debut album of all time has no fans. Have you ever met a single person who admitted to owning Cracked Rear View? Same with Melissa.
2. Forgetting to include attachments. This is the evil twin of #1: in addition to clicking on harmful attachments, we forget to include useful attachments. So when you see an email with the subject "Foolproof Plan for World Peace — Part Deux," don't get too excited. As awesome as the plan probably is, it's almost definitely not attached to the email.
3. Replying-all to huge mailing lists. Any email to a large alias inevitably results in someone (no doubt a proud Hootie CD owner) replying to everyone. The threads are always the same. Something rather mundane or obscure is sent to thousands of people. Then the fan mail starts pouring in:
"Why am I on this list?"
"Unsubscribe."
"Please also remove me!"
"Please stop replying to everyone — there are thousands of people on this alias."
"Me too!"
"SERIOUSLY — STOP REPLYING ALL!"
"Why are you shouting?"
"We never talk anymore."
The most famous of these threads at Microsoft started on a mysterious distribution list called "Bedlam DL3." 25,000 employees, 15.5 million e-mails, 195 GB of bandwidth, busted network. T-shirts were printed to commemorate the event.
4. Putting aliases in the "To:" field in order to see who's in them. To see names on an alias, you can put the alias in the "To:" field of an email and double-click it ... if you're a complete idiot. A friend of mine ("Jimmy") almost got fired by an executive for doing this. A product that this executive was in charge of was getting cancelled, but her team didn't yet know it. When Jimmy heard the scoop, he wrote his boss an e-mail that essentially said, "Hey there, so-and-so's team is getting canned. Here are the only three people worth keeping..." He then proceeded to add so-and-so's entire team to the "To:" line in order to find out the names of the "only three people worth keeping." The rest of what happened is left as an exercise to the reader.
5. Projecting a PowerPoint presentation. The amount of time wasted at Microsoft sitting in conference rooms waiting for the presenter to get the slides to work is mind-boggling. Does the projector handle your resolution? Press Fn-F5! Click the little icon in the lower left to resume your slide show. Not that icon! The other one! Oh, the screen saver's kicked in. Your laptop's suspending!
6. Getting instant messages (IMs) during presentations. Once the presentation is going, IM notifications inevitably pop up on the screen. This tends to happen most when you're presenting in front of hundreds of people. "Yo! How did the [blind-date/colonoscopy/armed-robbery] go?" "Hi, [term of endearment]! I can't wait to [verb] your [adjective][noun] [now/tonight/again/forever]!" I'm told that the latest version of Office fixes this. Let's hope so.
NOTE From the Editor: In 2007 Office system, Desktop Alerts for incoming e-mail messages are turned off by default when you run a PowerPoint 2007 presentation. See Turn Desktop Alerts on or off for more info.
7. Using Excel to cover up Unreal Tournament. Well, I've only seen this once, but it's so eponymous that it deserves to be celebrated. A few years ago, one of my team members frantically maximized Excel as I walked into his office. As I began discussing a technical issue with him, sounds of gunfire, grenades, and general human suffering erupted from his speakers. I had a difficult decision to make while recovering from my brief initial confusion: Do I acknowledge what was already mutually embarrassing and awkward, or do I ignore the obvious? I decided to conduct our technical discussion with the idyllic calm of a wartime correspondent. To his credit, I now know that should push come to shove, my team member could calmly discuss a spec during Armageddon without batting an eyelash.
As you can see, Microsoft employees are often just as befuddled as everyone else. It would blow your mind if you could hear how frequently basic Office tips are shared in my hallway at work. Spend a day here, and you'll find it impossible to believe that we're all Office mavens marching lockstep towards a streamlined plan for world dominion.
Then again, Office 2007 is far easier to use. I'm impressed by the many improvements in its user interface. So in a funny way, perhaps we're no longer as harmless as we used to be. World dominion may be within our grasp after all. If we could only remember to attach our plan in email…
About the author
Philip Su is a development manager in Microsoft Search. He has also been a developer in Office, MSN, and Windows. In his copious free time, Philip co-authored Building Tablet PC Applications, taught classes at the University of Washington, and managed to almost get fired twice. For more random wackiness about Philip, see his annually-updated blog.
Even Microsoft employees are not immune from the everyday pitfalls and mistakes that everyone is bound to make at work. Read Philip Su's hilarious take on how some of us Office "experts" make the same mistakes our customers do ... over and over again.
A question I frequently get from all my readers (yes, both of you!) is, "What's it like working at Microsoft?" Most people imagine that life at The Big One must be like working in a Geekalicious Nirvana. Everyone wears 3D goggles ("It's a Unix system! I know this!") and goes by handles like Crash Override and Acid Burn. Specifications are written in I33t. DeLoreans equipped with Mr. Fusions are the cars of choice. That sort of thing.
When I tell strangers that I work at Microsoft, I see the gears turning in their heads as they contemplate their next question. Inevitably, they ask one of the following:
"Have you been in Bill's house?" Usually, it's the 12-year-old in the bunch that asks this. No, I have not, but I have been on his lawn. Yes, all interns were invited; no, I did not talk with him; yes, I gorged myself on free food. None of this is half is interesting to the stranger, however, as the story of the intern who was forced out of Bill's house in handcuffs after running in during a "bathroom break" to make a phone call to his mom. "Hi mom! You'll never guess where I'm at right...ow! OUCH!" But I digress.
"Wow — can I drive your Ferrari?" This is a perennial favorite with the provisional driver's license crowd. They quickly lose interest once I fondly mention my '98 Honda Accord (V6! Too fast! Too furious!).
"Hey, my Outlook's not working…" "I don't understand the thing in Excel where you [verb] the [noun] with your [relative/neighbor] using [ctrl/alt/shift][F7/Enter/NumLock]..." It's a veritable MadLib of questions of the pattern, "In [Microsoft product of choice], how do I [some important thing that should be easy to do but isn't at all obvious]?"
The last type of question is by far the most common, especially with the airport crowd. But these strangers base their questions on a critically-flawed premise: They assume that Microsoft employees actually know how to use Microsoft products.
So without further ado, and to show you that we struggle with technology just like everyone else, here are the Top 7 Microsoft Employee Bungles using Microsoft Office that I've witnessed.
Top 7 employee bungles using Office
1. Opening dangerous attachments. Viruses like Melissa ("I love you!") were a huge problem at Microsoft. The kicker about it is that everyone acted flabbergasted and incredulous. "What sort of idiot clicks on these things?!" It's like Hootie and the Blowfish: the best-selling debut album of all time has no fans. Have you ever met a single person who admitted to owning Cracked Rear View? Same with Melissa.
2. Forgetting to include attachments. This is the evil twin of #1: in addition to clicking on harmful attachments, we forget to include useful attachments. So when you see an email with the subject "Foolproof Plan for World Peace — Part Deux," don't get too excited. As awesome as the plan probably is, it's almost definitely not attached to the email.
3. Replying-all to huge mailing lists. Any email to a large alias inevitably results in someone (no doubt a proud Hootie CD owner) replying to everyone. The threads are always the same. Something rather mundane or obscure is sent to thousands of people. Then the fan mail starts pouring in:
"Why am I on this list?"
"Unsubscribe."
"Please also remove me!"
"Please stop replying to everyone — there are thousands of people on this alias."
"Me too!"
"SERIOUSLY — STOP REPLYING ALL!"
"Why are you shouting?"
"We never talk anymore."
The most famous of these threads at Microsoft started on a mysterious distribution list called "Bedlam DL3." 25,000 employees, 15.5 million e-mails, 195 GB of bandwidth, busted network. T-shirts were printed to commemorate the event.
4. Putting aliases in the "To:" field in order to see who's in them. To see names on an alias, you can put the alias in the "To:" field of an email and double-click it ... if you're a complete idiot. A friend of mine ("Jimmy") almost got fired by an executive for doing this. A product that this executive was in charge of was getting cancelled, but her team didn't yet know it. When Jimmy heard the scoop, he wrote his boss an e-mail that essentially said, "Hey there, so-and-so's team is getting canned. Here are the only three people worth keeping..." He then proceeded to add so-and-so's entire team to the "To:" line in order to find out the names of the "only three people worth keeping." The rest of what happened is left as an exercise to the reader.
5. Projecting a PowerPoint presentation. The amount of time wasted at Microsoft sitting in conference rooms waiting for the presenter to get the slides to work is mind-boggling. Does the projector handle your resolution? Press Fn-F5! Click the little icon in the lower left to resume your slide show. Not that icon! The other one! Oh, the screen saver's kicked in. Your laptop's suspending!
6. Getting instant messages (IMs) during presentations. Once the presentation is going, IM notifications inevitably pop up on the screen. This tends to happen most when you're presenting in front of hundreds of people. "Yo! How did the [blind-date/colonoscopy/armed-robbery] go?" "Hi, [term of endearment]! I can't wait to [verb] your [adjective][noun] [now/tonight/again/forever]!" I'm told that the latest version of Office fixes this. Let's hope so.
NOTE From the Editor: In 2007 Office system, Desktop Alerts for incoming e-mail messages are turned off by default when you run a PowerPoint 2007 presentation. See Turn Desktop Alerts on or off for more info.
7. Using Excel to cover up Unreal Tournament. Well, I've only seen this once, but it's so eponymous that it deserves to be celebrated. A few years ago, one of my team members frantically maximized Excel as I walked into his office. As I began discussing a technical issue with him, sounds of gunfire, grenades, and general human suffering erupted from his speakers. I had a difficult decision to make while recovering from my brief initial confusion: Do I acknowledge what was already mutually embarrassing and awkward, or do I ignore the obvious? I decided to conduct our technical discussion with the idyllic calm of a wartime correspondent. To his credit, I now know that should push come to shove, my team member could calmly discuss a spec during Armageddon without batting an eyelash.
As you can see, Microsoft employees are often just as befuddled as everyone else. It would blow your mind if you could hear how frequently basic Office tips are shared in my hallway at work. Spend a day here, and you'll find it impossible to believe that we're all Office mavens marching lockstep towards a streamlined plan for world dominion.
Then again, Office 2007 is far easier to use. I'm impressed by the many improvements in its user interface. So in a funny way, perhaps we're no longer as harmless as we used to be. World dominion may be within our grasp after all. If we could only remember to attach our plan in email…
About the author
Philip Su is a development manager in Microsoft Search. He has also been a developer in Office, MSN, and Windows. In his copious free time, Philip co-authored Building Tablet PC Applications, taught classes at the University of Washington, and managed to almost get fired twice. For more random wackiness about Philip, see his annually-updated blog.
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