It would be interesting to see if there was actually a budgetary line item (mapped directly to specific General Ledger accounts) which came to $200M.
More likely, $200M includes soft costs and estimates of soft costs. My brother-in-law works for a small company which claimed to have spent over $100K on training for its IT people last year. The IT people were surprised, because very few of them had gotten to go to any classes, and the few classes which had been taken were certainly not $100K worth.
It turns out that you get $100K if you add up not just the cost paid to the training vendors for classes but also the salaries, benefits, overhead, and travel expenses of the people who attended classes while they were at class. The bean counters apparently also added an allowance for the wages, benefits, and overhead of administrative assistants who scheduled the classes and processed the vendor invoices. Furthermore, attendance at little half-day freebie seminars that vendors frequently put on locally was chalked up as "training" for the purposes of the $100K figure. In addition, all computer books which were expensed during the year were added into the $100K figure (along with aother allowance for administrative processing of the expenses).
There was never $100K on any line item in accounting. The figure was just pulled together in an attempt to make a misleading point. (I suppose it could have been worse; these folks may get even less pseudo-training in 2003.)
So I'm guessing that Microsoft's $200M figure includes the cost of soft drinks consumed by developers working on security, the benefits for the guy who restocks the fridge, the cost of having someone pick the non-recyclable trash out of the "recyclable cans only" bin where the developers throw their empties, etc.
I'm not really making fun of Microsoft, just pointing out that corporations can easily find the numbers to claim that it costs $1M for their CEO to fart.
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