看得我不想喝COFFEE了......

Buy the gross? Coffee at $300/lb.

The world's most expensive -- and legendary -- java beans are harvested from piles of dung. April 7, 2004: 11:50 AM EDT

JAKARTA (Reuters) - How much would you pay for a cup of liquid cat dung?

Quite a lot, if some highly discerning coffee drinkers are anything to go by.

On the lush, volcanic slopes of the Indonesian archipelago, villagers "harvest" kopi luwak. The beans used for the world's rarest and most expensive coffee have already been munched by cat-like palm civets before they are plucked from the dung to be dried and roasted.

Retailing in North America and Europe for up to $600 per kg, kopi luwak, literally "civet coffee" in Indonesian, is not a brew for the faint hearted.

Less than 500 pounds of it are estimated to be produced a year on the islands of Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi, and war and disease are making it even harder to find.

"I first read about it in 1980, but didn't manage to get my hands on any until 1993," said Michael Beech of Raven's Brew Coffee Inc. Until last year, when supplies began to dry up, it was the main supplier of kopi luwak in the United States.

His clients have ranged from ordinary java junkies to comedy actor John Cleese of Monty Python fame, he said. The firm has a backlog of 300 kopi luwak orders to fill at $75 a quarter pound.

"To be honest, you can't get $75 worth of quality in any coffee. You are really paying for the experience," Beech said.

The brew has become so rare that a newly published book on coffee in Indonesia, "A Cup of Java," relegates it to legend.

"We have failed to find any coffee-seller who admits to actually selling kopi luwak from the feces of the civet cat," write authors Gabriella Teggia and Mark Hanusz.

To many Indonesians, the term kopi luwak has come to mean simply the beans which the civet -- a notoriously fussy eater which selects only the ripest coffee cherries -- would choose.

"We just use the name for branding, but we don't trade in it," says Jeffrey Susanto, whose family runs the Kopi Luwak string of gourmet coffee shops in Jakarta.

Guerillas, cats and elephants
The rarity of kopi luwak is confirmed by Nugroho Bintang Satrio, the Central Java chief of the Indonesian Coffee Exporters Association.

"Only a tiny portion of small-holders are left who collect it," he said, adding that traders buy it at about $1.30 per kilo, about twice the price of ordinary robusta.

In the last year, a government offensive against rebels in rugged Aceh province on the northern tip of Sumatra has also cut into supply. "Farmers get killed if they harvest the coffee too far into the bush," one trader said.

Then there is the bad press caused by the deadly flu-like SARS virus. Civets, which are not cats but are related to mongooses, have been slaughtered in their thousands in China and imports banned from many Western countries for fear they carry SARS.

"Even if SARS was associated with the coffee itself, by the time it's collected and washed there is a very long period that has elapsed," says Massimo Marcone, a food scientist at the University of Guelph in Canada, who has carried out extensive tests on kopi luwak and deemed it safe.

Yet despite all that, some still harbor doubts.

"Sumatra, in the popular imagination anyway, is just too close to China and I'm just wary of the whole SARS thing," says Beech, adding that Raven's Brew may cease to offer kopi luwak.

"We are working on an elephant poop coffee," he says with a chuckle, explaining a plan he vows is serious. The plan is to feed coffee to tuskers at an elephant orphanage in Sri Lanka and sell the product, farming the proceeds back into the orphanage.

"It will be a do-gooder coffee, pooped out by bonafide orphan elephants," Beech explains.

Plus, it doesn't taste so good
According to some experts, a bean that has been partly digested tastes special.

"What I did find with kopi luwak was that the acids, the gastric juices and the enzymes were actually getting inside the bean and breaking down the proteins," Marcone said.

"You start getting amino acids. When these things are heated during roasting, they react with other components and they create certain flavor compounds different from other beans."


So what does the world's most pricey coffee taste like? Coffee buffs say it depends on whether the civet has been eating arabica or robusta beans.

"Initially people thought it must be the best coffee in the world, but I have to be honest about it, it's a crappy cup of coffee," Beech said of the robusta variety.

No matter how exotic the processing, it is mostly robusta cherries the luwak munches. That fact is a legacy of the coffee blight which in 1878 destroyed every low-lying arabica plant from Ceylon to Timor, allowing Brazil and Colombia to take the lead as the world's main suppliers of arabica.

Weeks of phone calls around Indonesia results in a fragrant mailbox containing a brown envelope from an East Java coffee trader. Inside is 250 grams of brown gold -- kopi luwak arabica.

The aroma is rich and strong and the beans oily. Ground and steeped in boiling water the flavor is, well, much like any other coffee. But the experience lingers in the memory.

Find this article at:
http://money.cnn.com/2004/04/07/news/funny/civet_coffee.reut/index.htm

[此贴子已经被作者于2004-4-7 20:44:26编辑过]

Betting it all on a single spin

April 8, 2004: 9:12 AM EDT

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A British man who has sold all his possessions, including his clothes, will stand in a rented tuxedo on Sunday and bet everything on a single spin of the roulette wheel.

If he wins, he doubles his money. If he loses, he will be left with only the television crew documenting his every move.

Ashley Revell, a 32-year-old Londoner, said he was worth about £75,000 ($138,000) after he sold everything in March.

"I thought I was worth at least £100,000," he said in a telephone interview from Las Vegas, where he is putting in a week gambling about $3,000 in a bid to raise his pot.

By Wednesday, he was down $1,000.

Revell said he had planned to have a friend videotape his bet-it-all spin, but Britain's Sky One television decided it was worth a short reality series, called "Double or Nothing."

Sky will not pay him, he says, but a crew has followed his preparation and will cover the spin live on Sunday at the Hard Rock casino in Las Vegas. It also plans to follow him for a month afterward, win or lose.

Revell, recently a professional gambler, said he decided to take a big plunge while he was still young and raised the stakes as high as possible, including selling his clothes.

"I like to do things properly," he said. ()

He had not decided yet whether to place his money or red or black on Sunday afternoon.

"I don't know man," he said. "One of them is going to be the right thing to say and one is going to be the wrong thing."

He added that if he won he would probably take his winnings rather than spin again.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Find this article at:
http://money.cnn.com/2004/04/08/news/funny/roulette.reut/index.htm

Revitalizing Drinks Are Also Pepping Up SalesBy SHERRI DAY

Published: April 4, 2004


VODKA mixers. Hangover remedies. Serious jolts of caffeine. However they are used, so-called energy drinks have quickly become the elixirs of choice for teenagers and young adults too hip for espressos, colas and fancy teas.

The drinks - which consist mostly of sugar, water and caffeine, but also a variety of vitamins, herbs and supposedly energy-enhancing extracts - have overtaken bottled water as the fastest-growing segment of the beverage industry. Beverage companies are rushing into this $1 billion market to grab share from Red Bull, the pioneer in the field, whose drinks went on sale in the United States seven years ago. And they need no other lure than young consumers' willingness to buy 8-ounce cans of energy drinks for at least two times the cost of a 12-ounce cola. By some volume measures, the multiple is even higher. "In convenience stores, a case of Red Bull sells for about six times the amount of a case of Coke or Pepsi," said John D. Sicher, the editor and publisher of Beverage Digest, a trade publication. "The margins are somewhere between excellent and obscene."

In the last three years, hundreds of energy drinks have flooded store shelves, bearing names that range from the exotic, like Piranha (from EAS International, a nutrition and supplements company), to the morally questionable, like Pimp Juice (from Fillmore Street Brewery in Overland, Mo.). Though Red Bull, an Austrian company, controls about 50 percent of the United States market, its share shrank by 3.7 percentage points in the year ending last April, according to Beverage Digest.

"They need to step on it," said Tom Pirko, the president of Bevmark, a beverage industry consulting firm in Santa Barbara, Calif. "I would spend a lot more money fast, and it's a good investment." Executives at Red Bull said their chief executive, Dietrich Mateschitz, was unavailable for an interview until autumn. In a statement, the company said that it had no plans for drastic changes.

"The strategy of Red Bull has not changed in any significant respect in 15 years, and certainly not due to the launch of well over a hundred me-too products, most of which have already disappeared from the market again," it said. "Losing relative shares in a more competitive, dynamically expanding market while increasing absolute volume is a perfectly natural process."

The company says its worldwide sales rose 10 percent last year, and it claims that it still has a global market share of 70 to 90 percent.

Red Bull sells only two products - its original energy drink and a sugar-free version, introduced last year. It uses a minimum of national television advertising, focusing its marketing on sponsorships of extreme-sports events and athletes, and lobbying bars, clubs and other retail outlets to sell its products.

WHAT has made Red Bull and other energy drinks so popular among their target market -18- to 25-year-old men - is the drinks' caffeine-enhanced buzz, analysts say. An 8-ounce serving typically has about 80 milligrams of caffeine, about the same as a cup of coffee and more than twice as much as a 12-ounce can of Pepsi or Coke.

In addition, Red Bull is enhanced with the sugar glucuronolactone, which is found in grain and red wine. It also contains taurine, an amino acid that grew into an urban legend as party-goers described it as an energy-enhancing compound extracted from bulls' testicles. Taurine actually occurs naturally in human muscle and is also found in scallops, fish, poultry and infant formula.

Many of the drinks also contain vitamins and herbs like guaraná, ginseng and ginkgo, to which marketers attribute various health and wellness claims. Red Bull, for example, says its drinks improve performance - especially during times of increased strain or stress - bolster concentration, improve reaction speed and stimulate metabolism. Some food experts argue that the additives offer little in the way of tangible benefits.

"Manufacturers cash in on that whole idea of functional foods, of creating different foods and beverages with supposedly special benefits, usually involving health, and then charging extra for them," said David Schardt, a senior nutritionist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. When consumers "pay a lot of money for these energy drinks, they're probably expecting more than what you'd get from a strong cup of coffee," he added.

Federal regulators have been examining energy drinks to ensure that they are labeled properly and meet the claims they make.

Energy drinks, including Red Bull, have been banned by several European countries - including Denmark, Norway, Sweden and France - because of their high levels of caffeine. Marketers say they are not worried about the prospect of government regulation in the United States, because the caffeine levels and herbal supplements they use are found in other unregulated products.

"Now consumers are so savvy about what ginseng and guaraná are, these ingredients aren't as foreign and as strange as they were once seen," said Kristine Hinck, a spokeswoman for PepsiCo's SoBe line of beverages, which includes energy drinks.

In the United States, Red Bull first became popular in Santa Cruz, Calif., health clubs, analysts said. The company focused its early marketing on extreme-sports enthusiasts, who gulped it down in hopes of enhancing their performance. As the company slowly built a nationwide distribution network, Red Bull also became hip in bars and clubs, where young revelers mixed the drink with vodka or used it, they claimed, to accelerate the recovery from hangovers. Analysts attribute the transition from health clubs to bars to aggressive marketing by the company, but Red Bull says consumers themselves demanded the drink.


With bars charging as much as $7 to $8 for an 8-ounce Red Bull that cost $1.99 at the grocery store, competitors began offering to undercut those prices. Red Bull filed lawsuits last year against four clubs and bars, contending that it had caught them substituting cheaper beverages when customers ordered Red Bull. The suits have been settled on undisclosed terms.

THE challenges to Red Bull come from companies big and small. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo entered the market in 2001; Red Bull, Coke's KMX and Pepsi's Amp and SoBe lines accounted for 90 percent of all energy drink sales in 2002, according to Mintel Consumer Intelligence, a market research firm. Anheuser-Busch also jumped into the fray in 2001, with its citrus-flavored 180.

Lately, smaller companies have flooded convenience-store shelves with less expensive products. For example, Rockstar, a company based in Las Vegas, introduced an energy drink in 16-ounce cans in 2001. Its promotes it as "twice the size of Red Bull for the same price."

"I saw that everyone else had basically copied Red Bull with small-size cans," said Russell Weiner, the chief executive of Rockstar. "I said we'll take over. I had such faith. I knew that if I wanted it, other people did, too."

Fuze Beverage also markets its Omega Energy Drink in a 16-ounce version. There are also so-called urban energy drinks, which trade on the celebrity of their namesakes, like Liquid Ice, named after the rapper Ice-T, and Russell Simmons's DefCon 3.

For many of the upstarts, the most difficult challenge is getting their products into supermarkets and convenience stores, where 60 percent of all energy drinks are sold, according to Mintel Consumer Intelligence. Red Bull has built a strong network of independent distributors, and Coke and Pepsi can use their bottling networks to reach customers.

It is across store counters, not bars, that marketers hope to reach their next wave of customers - mothers, harried office workers and the health-conscious.

"We think energy drinks are the new coffee," said Scott Moffitt, the vice president for marketing at SoBe. "It delivers the pick-me-up that coffee does. But it tastes better, and it's better for you. It has a better image, and it's more portable. You can't throw a cup of coffee in your backpack."

偶从来不喝ENERGY DRINK, 大伙儿都喝吗?

find this article at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/04/business/yourmoney/04drink.html

[此贴子已经被作者于2004-4-9 11:26:18编辑过]

My Principles, or the Milk and Cookies?

By JEFFREY L. SEGLIN Published: January 18, 2004


ROWING up in Boonton, N.J., I routinely stopped at the supermarket on my way to the local bowling alley to pick up a package of Archway ginger cookies, my favorite snack at the time. More than 30 years later, as an adult living in Boston, each time I shop at the grocery store I buy three half-pint boxes of milk - the kind that requires no initial refrigeration - to have on hand in the pantry. And I continue to buy Archway cookies.

Both products are made by Parmalat, the Italian conglomerate in which executives are accused of making up phony bank accounts and siphoning off ([URL=http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=95891&dict=CALD]点击看解释[/URL])millions in company funds to finance other ventures.

Now I face a choice: Should I stop buying both products as a sign of dissatisfaction with the company?

What makes this scandal different from some others is that Parmalat makes products that I immediately recognize. In my daily life, I never encounter the Enron brand, and I wouldn't recognize a Tyco product if it were to hit me through a $6,000 shower curtain. But Parmalat's products are different. I use them. I like them. I feed them to my grandsons.

So do I stage a personal boycott? If I say yes, is it because I believe it's wrong to buy products from a company in the midst of a scandal? Or because this is the scandal that broke this camel's back? Or because I believe that not doing so would signal that I condone ([URL=http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=16019&dict=CALD]点击看解释[/URL])bad behavior at the top?

"One of the questions you have to ask yourself is, 'What message am I sending and to whom?' " said Michael Josephson, the president of the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Marina del Rey, Calif. He said that by boycotting the products, I would be more likely to hurt the roughly 36,000 employees at Parmalat companies who have not been accused of wrongdoing.

But do companies deserve an ethical pass out of concern that a boycott might cost employees their jobs? "Employees can be innocent victims of boycotts and this is unfair," said Joseph L. Badaracco Jr., a professor of business ethics at Harvard Business School. But the problem is unavoidable, he said, "short of giving up boycotts, which isn't good either,'' adding that doing so would let "bad managers use their employees as human shields to protect themselves from boycotts they deserve."

But the question remains: Is a boycott deserved? "If executives are willing to engage in financial corruption, I would be less likely to trust them and less likely to buy their product," said Linda Klebe Treviño, a professor of organizational behavior at Pennsylvania State University. "I would ask myself if these executives would also be willing to compromise product quality or even safety for short-term financial gain."

Even Mr. Josephson, who expressed concern that a boycott might punish the wrong people, said his biggest fear was that the cumulative effect of egregious ([URL=http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=24949&dict=CALD]点击看解释[/URL]) corporate behavior would be to make people "immobilized and immune" - to cynically accept such behavior as the status quo.

All this insight, of course, does nothing to instruct me about my Parmalat conundrum.

"If you don't like what a company is doing, then you shouldn't buy its products, not because you hope it will impact them, but based on the principle that you don't want your personal money going to some firm that is doing something of which you disapprove," said Laura P. Hartman, a professor of business ethics at DePaul University in Chicago and co-editor of "Rising Above Sweatshops: Innovative Approaches to Global Labor Challenges" (Praeger, 2003).

If I buy her argument, am I destined to a life without my favorite cookies and milk? Not necessarily. "If the firm makes the right choices, ousts the bad guys and changes its practices, then you should go ahead and support it again," she said.

As I write this, 10 people associated with the Parmalat scandal have been arrested. A turnaround team had been brought in to try to shore up the company's finances. None of this is enough to indicate that the company has been set straight. But it's a nice start. And, soon, Parmalat's milk and cookies may again be gracing my cabinets.

Jeffrey L. Seglin teaches at Emerson College in Boston and is the author of "The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business'' (Spiro Press).
Find this article at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/business/yourmoney/18ethi.html?ex=1081915200&en=80eb86355a533a49&ei=5070

The Uncertainty Factor

By DAVID BROOKS Published: April 13, 2004

Twenty years ago, Secretary of State George Shultz went to the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York to give a speech about terrorism. Fighting a war on terrorism, he emphasized, means coping with uncertainty.

Terrorists operate outside the normal rules, Shultz observed. Because an attack is so hard to anticipate, he said, "our responses should go beyond passive defense to consider means of active prevention, pre-emption and retaliation. Our goal must be to prevent and deter future terrorist acts."

We can't wait for the sort of conclusive evidence that would stand up in a court of law. "We cannot allow ourselves to become the Hamlet of nations, worrying endlessly over whether and how to respond." We have to take the battle to the terrorists so we can at least control the time and place of the confrontation.

And we have to plan these counteroffensives aware of how little we know for sure.

Facing such great uncertainties, Shultz continued, the president has to take extra care to prepare the electorate: "The public must understand before the fact that some will seek to cast any pre-emptive or retaliatory action by us in the worst light and will attempt to make our military and our policy makers — rather than the terrorists — appear to be the culprits. The public must understand before the fact that occasions will come when their government must act before each and every fact is known."

The Shultz speech opened a rift within the Reagan administration. Shultz's argument was that uncertainty forces us to be aggressive. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, on the other hand, argued that uncertainty should make us cautious. As one Weinberger aide told The Times, "The Pentagon is more aware of the downside of military operations and therefore is cautious about undertaking operations where the results are as unpredictable as in pre-emptive strikes against terrorists."

Shultz and Weinberger were clear and mature. Both understood there is no perfect answer to terror and both understood the downsides of their respective positions.

Two decades and a national tragedy later, it is hard to find anybody that consistent.

If you follow the 9/11 commission, you find yourself in a crowd of Shultzians. The critics savage the Clinton and Bush administrations for not moving aggressively enough against terror. Al Qaeda facilities should have been dismantled before 9/11, the critics say.

Then you look at the debate over Iraq and suddenly you see the same second-guessers posing as Weinbergerians. The U.S. should have been more cautious. We should have had concrete evidence about W.M.D.'s before invading Iraq.

Step back and you see millions of people who will pick up any stick they can to beat the administration. They're perfectly aware of the cruel uncertainties that confront policy makers, but, opportunistically, they ignore them.

Nor has the administration itself demonstrated that it can operate as intelligently as Shultz in a world of uncertainty. The administration war plan called for a lean, high-tech invasion. That's fine if you know who your enemies are and where you can hit them. But if you don't have that information, you probably have to hang around, feeling your way through the neighborhoods. For that you need boots on the ground — enough to cope with the unexpected. You need heavy armor, because it's likely your enemies will strike first before you know where they are.

The Bush administration sent too few troops into Iraq, and they stuck them in Humvees that couldn't withstand a semi-serious terrorist attack.

Worse yet, the administration never bothered to educate the American people on the nature of war amid uncertainty. The president did not stress beforehand that it was necessary to act, even though some of his suppositions would inevitably prove to be incorrect.

When you read the Shultz speech, you get the impression the country is aging backward. Twenty years ago we had a leader who treated us like adults, mature enough to cope with harsh uncertainties. Now we're talked to as if we're children, which, if you look at the hypocrisy-laden terror debate, is about what we deserve.

find the article at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/opinion/13BROO.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists

A Quirky Brilliance vs. the Dreams of Venture Capitalists

By SAUL HANSELL Published: April 26, 2004

Not every company would coyly spurn billions of dollars and front-page attention. Yet Google seems intent on staying private as long as possible despite the clamoring of investors to own a piece of a company that has become synonymous with instant information on the Web.

There are many good reasons to avoid a public stock offering and the close scrutiny it brings. Indeed, this week the scrutiny will intensify as the company approaches a deadline to file financial disclosures. But in Google's case, its hesitancy up to this point has been a symptom of a long-running battle for control between its two brainy, headstrong founders and the powerful, strong-willed financiers who gave them the money to turn their graduate school project into one of the world's leading brands, according to several people in and outside Google.

The two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who own perhaps 40 percent of the company, could become billionaires several times over if they take it public. But according to people who have dealt with them, they are less interested in cashing out than in maintaining their ability to direct Google's ambitious strategy and idiosyncratic style.

A lawyer who has worked for Google and declined to be identified out of concern over client confidentiality, remarked, "There are a lot of quirky demands that are made over there that are not made by traditional financial market considerations but are more about control of the founders."

For the venture capitalists - John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital Partners - the motives are more clearly financial. They have benefited by agreeing to the founders' request to delay a stock offering while the company and its perceived market value grew rapidly. But now, with competition from Microsoft on the distant horizon, it may be an ideal time to cash in on the investment.

Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia put up $25 million in June 1999, buying about 25 percent of the company, according to people involved in the transaction. If a publicly traded Google became worth, say, $20 billion, that would give the investors an 800-fold return on their money, making it one of the best investments in history. And since many of their other investments made at the peak of the Internet boom have collapsed, the venture capitalists need a big return from Google all the more.

Attention is being focused this week on Google because Thursday is the deadline for it to file financial disclosure documents under Securities and Exchange Commission rules. It could meet those requirements by filing papers for a public stock offering - what the venture capitalists are said to favor. Or it could simply file the disclosure papers, perhaps along with a statement that it will begin eventually to move toward a public offering. A person close to the company said last week that it would proceed with this slower course.

Executives at Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia referred calls for comment to Google, which declined to speak about any matters related to a prospective public offering.

But other executives who have worked with Mr. Doerr and Mr. Moritz said they would be surprised if the financiers were not pushing very strongly for a quick public offering.

"Venture capitalists want to cash out," said George Bell, the chief executive of Upromise and former chief executive of Excite@Home, two companies backed by Kleiner Perkins. "This is life. People have to deal with the fact that if you start a company and ask a venture capitalist to take a risk, they are going to want to secure a financial outcome that is highly desirable."

Mr. Bell said he hoped to fend off that pressure and keep Upromise, a college savings and marketing company, private as long as possible. "It is a big distraction to be public," he said, noting that it costs millions of dollars a year to comply with accounting and disclosure rules and to provide liability insurance to officers and directors against shareholder suits.

Of course, Google's current value stems from the founders' willingness to rethink methods of how to search Web pages, at a time when many Internet experts thought that problem had been solved. And the company now appears to be looking at extending its business in ambitious ways, like a new e-mail service for consumers. But the ambitions of the Google founders wander further afield. They have talked about building space transporters and implanting chips in people's heads that can provide them with information as they think. (really? )

A public offering would put these sorts of dreams in a very different light. And it is not hard to imagine Google's share price dropping some day after a comment by Mr. Brin or Mr. Page led investors to worry that too much money was being diverted to lunar-rover design or some other project unlikely to increase the next quarter's earnings.

Since Google is growing rapidly and is profitable, there is no immediate business need for them to sell shares.

"They have so much cash in the bank, they don't need go public," said Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems who was Google's first investor. Mr. Bechtolsheim, who is not involved in Google's management, said there is a lot of pressure on Google's founders to go public.

"But it's a hard decision," he said. "It's nicer to live life as a private company, as opposed to living life under the microscope."

In public, Google executives have flippantly played down the importance of selling shares. In January, The Times of London reported that Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, told a closed-door meeting that "an I.P.O. is not on my agenda right now."

And in March 2003, Mr. Brin told a gathering of technology executives that Google was avoiding a pubic offering because "that's a lot of work, and I'm lazy."

He added that an offering "requires filling out a lot of forms."

"The S1, in particular, seems like a really long one," he said, referring to the main document that companies are required to file disclosing their finances and other information to prospective investors.

Google has hardly been lazy working to manage the timing of an eventual offering. Early on, it split itself into two companies, Google Inc. and Google Technologies, so that each would have fewer than 500 employees, according to a person who had been close to Google. That was important because the S.E.C. requires companies with 500 shareholders and assets greater than $10 million to file financial statements and most of the other information they would have to disclose in a public share offering.

Early in 2003, the two companies were merged, in effect setting the date of April 29, 2004, as the deadline for Google to make the required disclosure. (The law requires a public filing 120 days after the close of a company's fiscal year, in this case April 29.)

In the meantime, the company has also been working hard to make sure that it could go public if it wanted to. Earlier in the year, it completed an audit meant to verify its compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, a law intended to enhance disclosure and oversight at public companies. And now Google's corporate Web site lists a job for a manager for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, a job title that seems inherently unnecessary at private businesses.

Ultimately, the biggest pressure to go public may be from Google's employees. The company is profitable and the founders could receive millions of dollars a year if it simply paid a regular dividend. But for many engineers and executives who have earned stock options in the last few years, a public offering is all that stands between them and a sports car, a beach house or a year in Tibet.

"Obviously in the end, there's a lot of people who want a liquidity event," Mr. Bechtolsheim said, using the venture-capital jargon for a deal that allows stock to be converted to cash. "It's a trade-off."

find this aritcle at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/26/technology/26google.html

[此贴子已经被作者于2004-4-26 12:08:55编辑过]