http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060630/apple_stock_options.html?.v=5

Great Job, Steve.

I guess that's it. Get out while you can if you hold some. I don't. Shitty company. Lying CEO. Had to end this way. R.I.P.

At this point you may be overreacting. Looting the company and cheating the (small) stockholders is viewed as perfectly acceptable in American business practices these days. In most cases it's legal. I guess the rub comes if it isn't done using the many widely accepted methods.

Well, have no fear! "Apple said it has hired an outside lawyer to spearhead an investigation..." Spearhead! The Apple investigative police force is right on the job. Soon they will find and fire some low-level accountants who never heard of the transactions. There will be a speedy roundup of the uninvolved and harsh punishment of the innocent. Through this method things will be put right and Apple can go back to doing exactly what it has done in the past.

quote:

Originally posted by HighHopes:
At this point you may be overreacting. Looting the company and cheating the (small) stockholders is viewed as perfectly acceptable in American business practices these days. In most cases it's legal. I guess the rub comes if it isn't done using the many widely accepted methods.

Well, have no fear! "Apple said it has hired an outside lawyer to spearhead an investigation..." Spearhead! The Apple investigative police force is right on the job. Soon they will find and fire some low-level accountants who never heard of the transactions. There will be a speedy roundup of the uninvolved and harsh punishment of the innocent. Through this method things will be put right and Apple can go back to doing exactly what it has done in the past.

I disagree.

This is about backdated options, a practice that the IRS/SEC are not pleased with. Actually, they tend to act rather decisively in this context.

As for the low-level accountants, such things are decided by the compensation board in a public company which is anything but low-level.

I see class action lawsuits and restatements of past financial reports on the horizon.

Apple is kaputt.

We'll see.

.
Not much will come of this.

It's small potatoes as these things go.
.

klap didn't even read the article. Steve Jobs cancelled the options before he excersized them therefore he realized no gain from them.

Alterior motive because you don't like OS X much?

If someone explains what an option is, and how it works, I may be able to get angry about this. Can you get options on like, say, girls who are (for sake of argument) 17 years and 364 days old? Is that sort of how it works? Or would that tend to put me on the wrong end of a Dateline investigation?

quote:

Originally posted by BN:
If someone explains what an option is, and how it works, I may be able to get angry about this. Can you get options on like, say, girls who are (for sake of argument) 17 years and 364 days old? Is that sort of how it works? Or would that tend to put me on the wrong end of a Dateline investigation?

An option is an entitlement to purchase a share of a company at a given price. The question, of course, is: at what price ?

The legal proceeding is to price options according to the current price of the share, so that the people receiving them (managers of the company) have an interest in increasing the share price. Example: Apple shares are trading at 40 $, so an Apple manager gets options to buy Apple shares at 40 $, the so-called "strike price". If the share rises above 40$, the manager can buy it for 40$ and sell it at the higher price, so the option becomes more valuable, "in-the-money".

What Apple did, so-called "backdating" is to price the option according to a price that the share had in the past so that the option is "in-the-money" right away, example: Apple shares are trading at 40$, but the manager gets an option to buy it at 30$ and can sell it for 40$ right away. This is illegal.

@NDPTAL85: Jobs was only one person receiving backdated options. There were obviously more Apple-managers involved. We'll see.

P.S.: The lawsuits start rolling:

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060705/apple_stock_options.html?.v=5

This message has been edited. Last edited by: klapauzius,

quote:

Steve Jobs cancelled the options before he excersized them therefore he realized no gain from them.

The thing that rocked me was that so many silicon valley companies have disclosed this exact type of irregularity.

What it boils down to--though the article throws this away near the end like it's no big deal--is that it's about EXAGGERATING PROFITS. That's what Apple got caught doing, plain and simple. It's fishy to me that they caught THEMSELVES doing it. I assume that happened because somebody else was ABOUT to catch them. Perhaps the IRS gave them a chance to mount this type of independent investigation, before they really got dragged through the mud by them or the SEC. After reading the follow-up article about the lawsuits, it seems to me that they were sweethearted, and given a chance to come clean.

And just when they were gonna come out with some new home-biz financial software: iCooktheBooks.

The whole thing is loaded with spin. Which means there probably IS some impropriety in there. I find Apple much more scammy and conny in the OS X era. Much more likely to game everything, including the userbase. It's just more evidence that the soul of the Macintosh has yet to be saved.

I've said it a million times, but I'd love to see Apple go back to the days when it had a more gung-ho do the right thing/boyscout image. When they looked up to its customers and tried to make life easier for them. Now? Pffft. Now Apple comes off as a pack of geek elite advantage-takers, exploiting the technologically inexperienced, concentrating more on the marketing than making the product work well.

quote:

Originally posted by thalo:

quote:

Steve Jobs cancelled the options before he excersized them therefore he realized no gain from them.

What it boils down to--though the article throws this away near the end like it's no big deal--is that it's about EXAGGERATING PROFITS. That's what Apple got caught doing, plain and simple. It's fishy to me that they caught THEMSELVES doing it. I assume that happened because somebody else was ABOUT to catch them. Perhaps the IRS gave them a chance to mount this type of independent investigation, before they really got dragged through the mud by them or the SEC. After reading the follow-up article about the lawsuits, it seems to me that they were sweethearted, and given a chance to come clean.

And just when they were gonna come out with some new home-biz financial software: iCooktheBooks.

Hilarious. thalo did it again. Just hilarious.

Those were exactly my thoughts. This stinks to high heaven. Apple is one of those bullet-proof companies that no matter what happens always have someone lending a hand or a few million bucks, it's just incredible. But this thing just stinks.

Plus Apple shareholders have been trying to get them to report their option expenses correctly for YEARS and they wouldn't have it. I say this stinks and as soon as someone starts digging it'll stink even more.

I was always highly suspicious of Apple's financial statements lately. Nobody gets a 25% profit margin in this business. Nobody. Not even Apple. Not with the lousy quality and recall fireworks they had to put up all the time. Not even with the iPod.

We'll see.

Klappy you have some real perversion going on for a company.

Let's see in the end Apple could be fined by the SEC if impropriety is discovered. Then again it could all be offset by Apple receiving money back from the IRS for over paying their taxes in the years 1997 to 2001.

quote:

Originally posted by RicoX:
Klappy you have some real perversion going on for a company.

Let's see in the end Apple could be fined by the SEC if impropriety is discovered. Then again it could all be offset by Apple receiving money back from the IRS for over paying their taxes in the years 1997 to 2001.

Well, i just find it strange that a lot of people forget about their common sense in certain situations, like when a computer company with lousy quality products keeps posting numbers like 25% profit margin quarter after quarter. Hello ? Anybody home ? How can that be ? Plus a lot of criticism versus Apple is met wth the one-liner "but they are doing so great, look at their profits. They MUST be making great products". Well, yeah, with iCookTheBooks Apple really looks great !

We'll see.

quote:

Plus a lot of criticism versus Apple is met wth the one-liner "but they are doing so great, look at their profits. They MUST be making great products".

That's a very good point. Criticism deflection seems to have been the name of the game. To me, it's almost as if the iPod success has been running cover for Apple's desktop computer/OS failure. It has always been amazing to me that Apple apologists have pointed to ANY Apple success as if that makes all the crap smell better. It doesn't.

Not when what you need is good tools. And I do. I need a good pro/desktop computer and operating system. One that works. What I DIDN'T need, was a casual use machine and music player. Not that I can't stand having a little friggin' fun, not that I don't think digi-gizmos aren't mildly diverting. But in the grand scheme of what's important in my life, an MP3 player is not nearly as important as my primary working COMPUTER.

And yet time and again, X-Men have had this attitude that somehow by magic, if you improve the bottom line for Apple, by hook or by crook, it's going to magically improve the operating system. Well, it hasn't. OS X is as fundamentally bad today as it was years ago, at the public beta stage. I maintain that all we have had since, is one long fucking STRING of public betas. OS X right now is nothing more than a beta. Every piece of software made for it, right now, today, is a beta.

And yet we're paying commercial-release prices. We're paying for beta upon beta, and we're supposed to hold up our iPods and say thank you? Nah-ah.

Apple making (or appearing to make) more profit has not translated into better computer tools for people who need to get work done. Sorry, but this is as true today, as it was in our days at MFI. There are still things about OS X that simply don't work. There are rookie design mistakes and a terrible counterintuitive interface. There are still application stability issues that are so serious, that they cause me major mayhem on a daily basis. And it's not really improving.

Oh please. The years we are talking about here for the options were during 1997 to 2001. If profits were inflated during these years then Apple under Mac OS 9 was doing even worse than was ever imagined.

The options weren't canceled until 2003. And then they were simply traded for a sweet amount of stock.

Let's review a little history of that period from 1997-2001, shall we?:

Jobs became interim CEO of Apple in Sept. of 1997. Right when the funny financial stuff first dates to.

A scant few MONTHS later, Jobs announces OS X would ship in fall of 1999.

OS X Server debuts in March, 1999.
Mac OS X beta is released in Sept. of 2000.

[thalo is born roughly around this time]

10.0 comes out in March of 2001.
10.2 comes out in Sept. of 2001.
The iPod is first released in late October of 2001.

Inflating profits in those years was nothing about trying to make the legacy look good, believe me. The legacy's death sentence was already pronounced. The whole plan for the future of Apple under Jobs and OS X was being hatched then.

So you agree then that Apple was a sinking ship under Mac OS 9. It was the arrival of Jobs and his vision for Mac OS X that bailed them out putting a tailwind behind Apple again.

quote:

So you agree then that Apple was a sinking ship under Mac OS 9.

Yes.
I simply don't agree that it was the legacy's fault. It wasn't because the design and conception of the Mac OS interface was bad. That's not what made it attractive to pros, and passed over by the great unwashed masses. Windows didn't IMPROVE on the Mac OS interface and therefore dominate the market. That's not what happened.

In fact, I think the original Apple Human Interface Guidelines, which governed the design of the Finder and interface under Mac OS 9, are among the most brilliant ideas in the computer industry. Far more brilliant, in fact, than any design or conceptual precepts that governed Nextstep.

Mac OS X follows the Apple Human Interface Guidelines.

quote:

Mac OS X follows the Apple Human Interface Guidelines.

No. Apple rewrote the guidelines to fit the Nextsteppy parts of OS X. It was a major revision, broke old canons, and was consequently a major influx of crap.

quote:

Originally posted by RicoX:
Mac OS X follows the Apple Human Interface Guidelines.

Oh, really ?

When i started programming on the Mac i read the HIG and it was an epiphany for me.

Now, the OS9-HIG states very clearly that the maximize-box for a window should be in the right upper top, because that's where the friggin' scrollbar is and the close-box should be in the left upper top, AS FAR AWAY FROM THE FRIGGIN' SCROLLBAR AS POSSIBLE. So that people don't click the close-box by mistake. And the distance doesn't matter since you only click the close-box once since the window's gone then.

Now tell me again that OS X follows the OS9 HIG.

To me, the prime real estate for the Mac interface has always been the TOP of the screen, the menu bar.

If I could give one piece of advice to OS X interface designers, it'd be to get as much of the IMPORTANT controls up into the menubar again. One of the strongest positions in the menubar, is now inhabited by spotlight. Meh. Spotlight doesn't deserve it. It's not that essential, plus, it's in every friggin' Finder window anyway.

What used to be there? The APPLICATION menu... showing the user what things were running. Now that functionality rests with little triangles in the Dock. But when you keep the Dock as SMALL as possible, as many pros are wont to do... you kinda lose that, because the smaller the icons are, the harder they are to see.

In the legacy, the control strip had sort of infrequently-used functions, some of which are like the system menu icons now.

I think the OS X interface would be improved by really sitting and thinking about what functions should go where, with the most important stuff at the top, and the not-so-important stuff elsewhere.

I also think we don't need as much redundancy as we have. Where functionality is doubled and tripled up between the different layers of interface, all doing basically the same crap.

Finder toolbar, Dock, Command-Tab array, Left Finder column... fucking pick the smartest one and run with it.

Another thing that needs to be addressed is consistency and theme. Platinum LOOKED cohesive, because the design percolated into everything. There was one Mac interface, instead of many. Now, every friggin' widget and app looks like it came from a different planet. Nothing is cohesive or consistent. And the stuff that sometimes does manage to show up globally, like scrollbars, are FUGLY.