Google got a bunch of press earlier this week for giving out "free voicemail accounts" to the homeless. I tried to ignore the story, but it keeps getting written about, and it seemed like there were a few points worth making. First of all, this concept isn't new. Almost five years ago, we wrote about Cisco doing the same thing. There's a whole organization, called Community Voicemail, that has done this for years. But, an even more important point: Google's GrandCentral service is already free. For anyone. Whether you have a home or not. So, offering it for free to the homeless isn't anything special. In fact, it would really only seem newsworthy if, for some reason, the company were not offering accounts to the homeless. So, yes, basically, this is a story about how Google is offering its already free service to the homeless, even though the homeless have already had free voicemail offerings for years. Next thing you know, we're going to see a press release about how the homeless can now use search engines for free too... Plus, I hear that the homeless can get free Gmail accounts!

A few years ago, there was a big debate over whether or not companies should be forced to expense stock options. Most companies did not count stock option grants as an "expense" on the income statement, even though it could impact the company's financial situation. Some argued that this gave companies a way to hide compensation -- though, that was somewhat misleading. Most of the necessary information was still in the footnotes -- it just didn't play directly into the numbers. There was some speculation that if forced to expense stock options, companies would stop using them as an incentive and it would hurt the stock of many companies as it would be harder to appear profitable (more expenses dragging down the net income number). Of course, this was silly also. Since the number of stock option grants didn't have any real immediate impact on cash, it wasn't impacting the actual cash position of the company. It seemed likely that the market had already calculated in the "expense" of options. Indeed, after FASB decided that companies should expense options, the impending doom many predicted failed to appear.

Of course, that doesn't mean there still aren't question about how you expense stock options as there's no really good way to know how much they're worth. The standard method for calculating the price of an option, the Black-Scholes method, isn't really accurate for high growth companies -- but it's what is most commonly used. However, there have been some experiments to more accurately price options. Cisco kicked off the debate on this topic a couple years ago by proposing derivatives based on the options that could be publicly traded. Then, Cisco could expense the actual options based on the market price of the derivatives. The SEC rejected this plan, but it appeared that the rejection was mainly on some finer technical points. When another company, Zions Bancorp, proposed a very similar model, the SEC seemed much more willing to along with it. The latest is that the SEC has now approved Zions' plan for options expensing based on publicly traded derivatives. The story at Gigaom provides some of the reasons why this might not actually be a very accurate way of expensing options -- but it seems a lot more accurate than something like Black-Scholes. Also, again, the market has most likely already priced in the real impact of these numbers games into the stock price, so it shouldn't have any real impact. Given the approval, though, expect many other high growth companies to jump on board with similar plans, as it's likely to reduce the "expense" associated with options.

In the meantime, we're still surprised that there hasn't been more discussion about Google's experiment with actually allowing employees with stock options to sell the options themselves to institutional traders. That seems like it could be an even more accurate way of pricing the options, since there will be a real market for them. However, it still seems like it's being used merely as an employee perk, rather than a method for expensing options.

Apparently some patent holders simply can't wait to get their lawsuits going. A shell company that appears to not do anything went and sued Cisco on Tuesday of this week for violating its patent. There was just one little problem. The patent wasn't granted until Wednesday, so the case was quickly dismissed. Of course, the company refiled with a new date, but it's still pretty amusing that the patent holder was so anxious to get the lawsuit going (and shows that the company isn't particularly interested in trying to license the technology -- suing is apparently much more lucrative). Perhaps they want to make sure the lawsuit gets in before the Supreme Court (or Congress) crack down on ridiculous patent abuse.

Because a company can only be as strong as its customers, there's no way for tech companies to be completely insulated from broader economic events. Companies with a lot of exposure on Wall St. are going to be particularly susceptible to a slowdown, as some companies, like Cisco, have already stated that they're seeing weakness in this market. The latest to sound a similar warning is Tibco, a software provider with a lot of customers in finance. The firm described the financial sector as "notably weak" blaming it for an overall earnings shortfall. It should be noted that Tibco hasn't had a particularly stellar few years, so the company was already struggling a bit. Still, what's affecting Tibco is likely to affect a host of other related companies. Right now, there's a lot of concern about the health of the financial sector, but if troubles continue to persist, then the malaise is likely to spread elsewhere, potentially leading to spending slowdowns in other sectors.

By most accounts the tech industry continues to do well, but the rest of the economy is growing increasingly jittery about the long-term impact of the mortgage fallout. Of course, it's silly to assume that tech is an island, unaffected by the storms around it. Already, a number of firms have felt the effects of a tighter credit market, as it has affected their ability to do stock buybacks and M&A. And, of course, a company is only as strong as its customers, so if buyers of tech get nervous, this will start to affect corporate capital spending. That was the concern among analysts on yesterday's quarterly earnings call with Cisco. Although the company reported strong earnings, it did acknowledge weakness in the automotive and financial sectors, which makes sense given the turmoil in both of those industries. If things continue to spread to other sectors, and there's evidence that they will, more tech firms are likely to suffer from customer weakness.

Historically, major tech firms have shunned debt financing, but in recent years, this has changed somewhat. Highly acquisitive companies like Cisco and Oracle have started to use some debt to finance their purchases. As with the increasing presence of private equity in the tech industry, low interest rates have helped fuel this trend. But the low interest rate environment appears to be coming to an end, and its effects are already being felt in the industry. Yesterday, online travel site Expedia announced that it would suspend a planned share buyback program because it couldn't acquire the necessary capital to finance the purchases. Meanwhile, a few non-tech private equity deals are hitting the skids for similar reasons. In the past, industry, might have ignored these economic developments, but it's likely that a number of companies, particularly mature ones, are going to feel a pinch.