From: Harvey Newstrom (mail@HarveyNewstrom.com)
Date: Sat Jun 29 2002 - 09:59:44 MDT
On Saturday, June 29, 2002, at 07:34 am, Alex Ramonsky wrote:
>
>
> Brian D Williams wrote:
>
>> A brief piece in today's Investors Business Daily says that
>> Microsoft is planning to invest 750 million dollars in China in the
>> next three years.
>>
> That's a heck of a lot of cups and saucers! :)
Speaking of Microsoft, does anybody know anything more about the SEC's
investigations into Microsoft Accounting irregularities? Apparently,
they reserved profits in good years off the books to add in later during
lean years to make themselves always look profitable. This doesn't
sound (at first glance) as bad as claiming nonexistent profit, but it
still misrepresents the current state of the company. I haven't heard
much recently, probably due to bigger accounting scandals elsewhere.
There seem to be so many accounting scandals, and it seems widespread.
Consulting firms taught businesses how to do this. Auditing firms
rubberstamped it as OK. Banks help launder money and cook the books.
Stockbrokers pushed stocks even when they knew the claims were
overrated. Venture Capitalists set up and tore down companies just to
shuffle their funds around. All sides of the IT industry seem to have
been playing games to appear profitable when they really weren't. Now
it appears that major players, such as IBM and Microsoft used accounting
tricks to appear profitable, while honest players like Apple, Amazon,
Google and PetSmark remained surprisingly unprofitable.
I am beginning to wonder if there ever was an Internet boom at all.
What if the big Internet boom in corporate profitability was really
driven by these fictions? What if the real bust was caused by reality
rearing its ugly head? I hate to be so pessimistic, but it seems like
we have suddenly discovered that much of the financial history of the
past decade was fiction. I wonder how much if any of the Internet Boom
reporting was really accurate.
-- Harvey Newstrom, CISSP <www.HarveyNewstrom.com> Principal Security Engineer <www.Newstaff.com>
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