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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chuzzlewit who wrote (138039)	7/29/1999 2:48:00 PM
From: freeus	Respond to of 176387

re articles Fascinating, Chuzz: also seems like there's some hanky panky going on with how R&D shows up on the books and especially with "goodwill"...I more and more agree with you that earnings are not what they appear, when all these stock option plans proliferate and do not "seem" to dilute earnings...at any rate they certainly dilute shareholder value. Freeus

To: Chuzzlewit who wrote (138039)	7/29/1999 4:31:00 PM
From: Richard Forsythe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

OT I read the articles with interest. However, I'm not sure I agree with all the talk about expensing options as per Black-Sholes valuation. It seems that the best parallel is with employee perks. If you work for See's candy and they let you buy chocolate at cost in the employee store, how's that accounted for? Don't you just book the cost as cost and the revenue as revenue, so your gross margin would drop slightly? With options, the cost to the shareholders is in dilution and lost capital -- and the current accounting standards reflect that in EPS calculations. The VALUE of the option is higher than the cost to the company (in the same way that the value of the candy in the employee store is higher than the cost). But the cost is the cost, not the value. Yeh, I'm envious of employees who cash out $m in options, but then I'm also envious of the See's employees who can get a $20 box of candy for $7 (or whatever). Is there any flaw in this logic? On Topic I notice IDC reported very strong gains for IBM -- higher % than Dell in some markets. Do you see that as IBM growing channel inventory or genuine turnaround in the IBM PC business? Could they be a credible threat to Dell? Haven't seen much comment on the thread... Richard