From: Harvey Newstrom (mail@HarveyNewstrom.com)
Date: Sun Jun 30 2002 - 12:02:35 MDT
An interesting twist to this question is given in the New York Times:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/30/business/yourmoney/30TELE.html?pagewanted=
1&todaysheadlines>
Trying to Catch WorldCom's Mirage
By SETH SCHIESEL
Apparently, big companies like AT&T were actually doing well in the
Interent communications arena, but they didn't know it. They compared
their success to the much higher claims that are now known to be false.
AT&T says that it terminated working programs, penalized managers, and
scrapped projects that seemed second-rate, but now appear to have been
industry leaders.
Besides questioning whether the Internet Boom was as big as we thought,
we now have to ask if the Internet Bust was as big as we thought. Maybe
all these "second-rate" companies were really leading edge, but didn't
know it. Maybe AT&T really was beating WorldCom and Global Crossing if
we remove the accounting tricks. Maybe Apple really beat Microsoft in
recent years if we ignore Microsoft's subsidies from previously
unreported profit. Maybe all these companies that jumped on the
Internet bandwagon were really doing as well as anyone, and they only
thought they were failing when compared to fictional claims from the
real companies.
It may be that both the Internet Boom and Internet Bust were both
exaggerated by these accounting tricks. Instead of being such a
roller-coaster, the growth curve may be more stable and consistent.
Maybe business is continuing to grow at a normal and predictable rate,
and it was only our measurements that got confused for the past decade.
-- Harvey Newstrom, CISSP <www.HarveyNewstrom.com> Principal Security Consultant <www.Newstaff.com>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:15:07 MST