Microsoft Corp. today announced that its board of directors declared a quarterly dividend of $0.23 per share, reflecting a 3 cent or 15 percent increase over the previous quarter's dividend. The dividend is payable December 13, 2012 to shareholders of record on November 15, 2012. The ex-dividend date will be November 13, 2012.

The company also announced that Raymond V. Gilmartin, former chairman, president and chief executive officer of Merck & Co., Inc., has decided that after 11 years of service, he will retire from and not seek re-election to Microsoft's board of directors at the company's 2012 annual meeting of shareholders.

Netflix's CEO, Reed Hastings, has apologized for mishandling a recent price increase that caused customers to fly away in droves. However, that was immediately drowned out by the decision to split the Netflix service into two, one with the odd name of Qwikster. The new streaming service will still be called Netflix and continue to have the same dedicated website as the old physical media one, netflix.com. However, the DVD rental service is now branded Qwikster, which will also have it's own site. Crucially, both sites will operate completely independently, which means separate logins and user profiles for each one, causing significant inconvenience to customers.