The lockup for employees/former employees was different here. Executives had the 6 month lockup. Former employees who bought options were not supposed to be subject to any lockup. And current employees had no lockup, I believe until the end of the year, and then a lockup would be in place until the first quarter results or something (not sure how how many weeks they have to sell before they can’t ahead of an earnings drop, but I read that in other coverage of this mess).
The issue isn’t about lockup, it’s about share conversion and the fact that the company hired to do it didn’t get anyone the right information — some people didn’t get information at all — and once employees did get the correct information, printer or not, they can’t get in touch with the company, can’t get questions answered, and even if they’ve submitted paperwork, still don’t have the ability to sell their shares five days in.
I agree the printer excuse is dumb. You can find a printer for something worth potentially thousands of dollars. But the core complaints are valid. And this isn’t about lockup. It’s about poorly done share conversions.
To be completely fair, the printer comment seemed to be tongue in cheek. I’m sure if this really were a blocker, they would have easily solved it with a quick trip to FedEx office, as mentioned.
Applying Hanson's razor to this would be sort of strange due to the fact that this involved real money and people didn't understand or had extremely onerous ways to do what they wanted.
There was a big issue with PS3's having the OtherOS functionality being removed which resulted in a class action lawsuit and it was ruled in favor of the owners (who I was one of them). The lawyers made it so difficult to actually retrieve any money from the members to the point that the Judge ruled that the lawyers who represented the people in the class action didn't get any of the money they were promised and I'm fine that it cost Sony and lawyers because I was probably only going to get probably less than $20 and practically it would discourage Sony in the future to remove features from their products.
The issue isn’t about lockup, it’s about share conversion and the fact that the company hired to do it didn’t get anyone the right information — some people didn’t get information at all — and once employees did get the correct information, printer or not, they can’t get in touch with the company, can’t get questions answered, and even if they’ve submitted paperwork, still don’t have the ability to sell their shares five days in.
I agree the printer excuse is dumb. You can find a printer for something worth potentially thousands of dollars. But the core complaints are valid. And this isn’t about lockup. It’s about poorly done share conversions.