דוחו"ת של חברות הנסחרות בבורסה- לא רק כסף

חברות הנסחרות בבורסה בדרך מחויבות על־פי חוק לפרסם דוחו"ת עבור המשקיעים. כיום, בעידן האינטרנט, הרבה מהדוחו"ת הללו זמינים באתרי הבית של החברות. חוץ מנתונים כספיים וטבלאות לאין־ספור, מתחבאים שם גם דברים מענינים, בדרך כלל תחת הסעיף המפרט נסיבות שיוכלו לפגוע בהכנסות החברה. דוגמא אחת היא מה שיש לגוגל לומר על פורמטי תוכנה קניניים:

Proprietary document formats may limit the effectiveness of our search technology by preventing our technology from accessing the content of documents in such formats which could limit the effectiveness of our products and services

A large amount of information on the Internet is provided in proprietary document formats such as Microsoft Word. The providers of the software application used to create these documents could engineer the document format to prevent or interfere with our ability to access the document contents with our search technology. This would mean that the document contents would not be included in our search results even if the contents were directly relevant to a search. These types of activities could assist our competitors or diminish the value of our search results. The software providers may also seek to require us to pay them royalties in exchange for giving us the ability to search documents in their format. If the software provider also competes with us in the search business, they may give their search technology a preferential ability to search documents in their proprietary format. Any of these results could harm our brand and our operating results.

או מה שיש למיקרוסופט לומר על ההשפעה של קוד־פתוח ותוכנה חופשית על מחירי המוצרים שלה:

Challenges to our Business Model.

Since our inception, our business model has been based upon customers agreeing to pay a fee to license software developed and distributed by us. Under this commercial software model, software developers bear the costs of converting original ideas into software products through investments in research and development, offsetting these costs with the revenue received from the distribution of their products. We believe the commercial software model has had substantial benefits for users of software, allowing them to rely on our expertise and the expertise of other software developers that have powerful incentives to develop innovative software that is useful, reliable, and compatible with other software and hardware. In recent years, there has been a growing challenge to the commercial software model. Under the non-commercial software model, open source software produced by loosely associated groups of unpaid programmers and made available for license to end users without charge is distributed by firms at nominal cost that earn revenue on complementary services and products, without having to bear the full costs of research and development for the open source software. The most notable example of open source software is the Linux operating system. While we believe our products provide customers with significant advantages in security and productivity, and generally have a lower total cost of ownership than open source software, the popularization of the non-commercial software model continues to pose a significant challenge to our business model, including recent efforts by proponents of open source software to convince governments worldwide to mandate the use of open source software in their purchase and deployment of software products. To the extent open source software gains increasing market acceptance, sales of our products may decline, we may have to reduce the prices we charge for our products, and revenue and operating margins may consequently decline.

אמנם לא מקורי, אבל מעניין.
לא שצריך לקחת את הדוחו"ת הללו כתורה מסיני- ראו את המקרה האחרון עם חברת האבטחה מק'אפי.