Google's stock option accounting

There is a very good article in the WSJ today (subscription required) by David Gaffen about Google's quarterly reporting and share based compensation expense. I have written about this before here . My own view is that Google is purposely confusing the situation in order that amount of the company's going forward stock option expense is difficult to calculate, Why because the number is very large.

However, I do not think that analysts fully understand what is going on with the two types of option expense that Google has and how they have amortized out the pre-ipo intrinsic expense.