> Still there is pressure to bow to big money investors to continue having access to investment capital.
what "investment capital"? Facebook and Google aren't making up new stock to sell to banks or hedge funds or whatever.
actions like this are to keep the existing stock price up, which doesn't benefit the company directly at all, except indirectly by not pissing off employees with number-of-share-denominated stock grants and not having "wall street analysts" claim a company failed for not making it's numbers match the numbers the analysts made up and publicised before results came out.