PALO ALTO, Calif. (CNN/Money) -
Let's just forget the whole thing.
That's the delicious plea in the form of multiple re-statements that software maker Ariba (ARBAE: Research, Estimates) made Thursday, when the company said it would restate financial results going all the way back to 1999. In fact, the changes leave just one quarter untouched: Ariba's very first as a public company in 1999.
What a perfect metaphor for the whole dot-com era.
Ariba, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., makes software that companies use to manage their spending processes, and is a real company. But it turns out to have been using every trick in a very large playbook.
It was a go-go darling of the Internet age, a venture-backed success whose shares soared over a $150 at one point, compared with around $3 today.
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The company apparently got confused, however, between its own success and its ability to follow the rules. It didn't understand how to account for its CEO's air travel. It didn't get the accounting right for how to record sales to companies whose products Ariba in turn was buying. And when firms Ariba acquired doled out stock options to key employees just before the acquisition, Ariba failed to realize that those options should be considered compensation expenses.
According to Ariba's news release, it didn't get much right over the last four years: "Ariba also reviewed its accounting policies and their application to various additional items and identified a number of transactions in which the company's accounting policies had not been consistently or appropriately applied."
That just about sums it all up. Policies not consistently or appropriately applied. Does it sound familiar?
Unlike many companies from the era, though, Ariba is still around. That's a testament to all the money it raised and the fact that is does sell a real product. But its current embarrassment is a good proxy for the confused state in which much of the rest of the tech industry remains.
Who knows how long it will be before investors believe anything they read in Ariba's financial reports? (Regulators continue to probe its books.) That is the case for the rest of tech as well. Investors want to believe, but they don't trust.
So Ariba has literally re-written the history books -- all the way back to the time of maximum craziness for tech stocks. The rest of us can't undo all our sorry trades, mistaken career moves, dwindled 401(k)s and other errors.
Perhaps now that so much airbrushing of the tech era is finally happening it will soon be time to move on. Maybe then, we'll consistently and appropriately apply all the lessons we thought we'd learned before, about accounting, management, ethics -- and life.
Adam Lashinsky is a senior writer for Fortune magazine. Send e-mail to Adam at lashinskysbottomline@yahoo.com.
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