After two years of hand-wringing, it's now official: according to FASB, companies must now account for stock options as typical business expenses. For publicly-traded companies, the rule will take effect starting July 1, 2005. The FASB's logic: "We believe that recognizing the costs of these arrangements in financial statements improves the relevance, the reliability and the comparability of financial information."

Yet, as anyone who witnessed the tremendous boom of the Internet era knows, it was exactly these stock options that encouraged the best and the brightest to take a bet on the high-flying companies that later became Amazon, eBay or Yahoo. A coalition of tech companies promises to fight the rule change, but it looks like a fait accompli at this point.