Employees receive a wage for the work they deliver regardless of the profit of the company (with the obvious step function at insolvency). If the employee wants to share in the profit AND loss, then they're free to become shareholders.

Why is it that some employees feel like they should be better compensated when the company is profitable but have no interest in taking a pay cut when the company isn't profitable?

No, they have hundreds and a customer base to spread the costs of all those other items thinly enough to make sense. Having 3 datacenters and a full IT staff to support 1k odd people has to be justified and providing e-mail and document services can be done so cheaply it makes no sense to keep it in house.

In fact, that argument has been made so well that many large universities have moved to Google provided services. Providing e-mail is a commoddity business, so let the lowest cost provider do it.

Yes, all you need is a top-notch group of administrators with up-to-date skills to setup the system and monitor every security mailing list so that nothing leaks out. Plus routine maintinance, handling user requests, backup, recovery, and environment testing. Throw in their salaries along with datacenter floor space, power, and cooling on run-time costs not to mention depereciation and support on the hardware. Don't forget the additional staff time to document and track changes so that if someone leaves, dies, or is fired that the system can continue running.

This is a problem with many lines of work, not just IT and I deal with it daily: You cannot count on superman to do the job. Just because your current staff is top notch doesn't mean they'll still be there if another web boom happens. Then what?

We've gone through all this before. Your organization probably doesn't employ its own elevator or copier techs either.

Outsourcing commodity services, such as e-mail, saves serious money and provides better service.

FYI: Microsoft paid 5.2 billion in taxes last year on a profit of ~20 billion, so they paid roughly 25% as their income tax.

Yeah! I hate those richy-rich stock holders too! They only care about profits, not about us, the little guy.

Now, where did I put my 401k statement........