The companies I mentioned are not startups, nor are they dead. They were among the tiny percentage of startups that were wildly successful. Now they are matur

The companies I mentioned are not startups, nor are they dead. They were among the tiny percentage of startups that were wildly successful. Now they are mature, public companies that have either plateaued or started to slowly decline. But they will still be profitable for many years, and they should return those profits to the shareholders. That they are are not doing so is historically unprecedented. Other mature tech companies not paying dividends include Adobe, Autodesk, Apple, Cisco, EA, Activision, Intuit, Oracle, Symantec, Amazon, and Ebay. And the few that do pay dividends (IBM, HP, and Microsoft for instance) have a very low dividend yields. It seems to me that there has been a breakdown of corporate governance.