Microsoft Exec Rewards

I remember hearing about this via MiniMicrosoft, but now it is official.  From the Seattle Times:

Microsoft's top 900 leaders got almost $317 million in company stock Thursday, the first installment in a compensation plan meant to reward them for the company's performance during the past three years.

As an ex-Microsoft employee and current shareholder, all I can say is WTF? 

Lets see... what has Microsoft done recently: Vista is collosally late, over-budget, and under-delivering.  WinFS came, randomized all of SqlServer devision, cost the company untold dollars and was then quietly put to pasture.  Visual Studio 2005 did finally ship but was also late, and is still just playing catchup to Java community.  Avalon, the next generation of application has went through countless re-architectures, re-orgs, and has become little more than a better WinForms.  MSN has done well, but the MSN/Windows-Live naming is a total fiasco, and well... HotMail still sucks.

So what did these executives do to deserve this compensation?  I'm sure some of them do truely deserve it, but as a whole, this just further proves to me that Microsoft is a sinking ship.  (A-la IBM circa 1995...)