The article may not come from the most credible source, The Motley Fool, but the discussion describing the magnitude of cashflow Microsoft creates through stock options is very interesting. Why Microsoft's Stock Options Scare Me.

Forget Windows 2000. As far as I can tell, the single most lucrative product Microsoft sells is its own stock. Microsoft receives almost as much cash inflow from the stock market as it does by selling goods and services...Microsoft receives cash by issuing employee stock options, after which the company then receives billions of dollars in tax deductions from the IRS for doing so. Add in the warrants it sells on its own stock, and the company made over $5 billion off the stock market last year (fiscal year ended July 1999), tax-free. For comparison, its after-tax net income was only $7.8 billion. Microsoft may not be much in the programming department, but its accountants are impressive.