Ogling Google …
p2pnet.net Opinion:- Google is hot – more so than usual, that is.
Currently, its hotness is down to its forthcoming 1-gig email service and the fact an IPO is supposedly coming up. Or not, depending on who you read.
John Naughton has an excellent article in The Observer here. In it, he makes the point that if you ask a group of people – especially a business audience – how many use Microsoft software, almost everyone will raise their hand. One or two at most will use Apple Macs. And if you ask about Linux, “If the audience is drawn from corporate suits, no hands will show.
“Now comes the punchline: who uses Google? A forest of hands appears. ‘Ah,’ you say, ‘that’s very interesting, because it means you’re all Linux users.’ Stunned looks all round.”
And that’s exactly where it’s at.
Linux represents freedom and openness to many people.
Linux is commercial, so to speak – lots of people make lots of money from it – but it’s also open to DIY enthusiasts and tinkerers.
It’s layed back and relaxed – just like Google. Or at least, that’s the perception.
It was interesting to note that when privacy issues started being raised about Google’s email service, the reaction from the Google Guys seemed to be surprise. They apparently hadn’t considered that anyone would think they were trying to sneakily get information they weren’t supposed to have.
And you know what? Large numbers of people believe them.
Imagine Bill and the Boyz trying to say the same thing in similar circumstances.
How long can this very attractive – but apparently naive – attitude last? And how long will Google remain a cool kind of company, even if it is HUGE? And do the Google Guys want to become part of the Korporate Kluster, or do they want to keep on providing a service which people like and trust?
An Initial Public Offering assumes the offerer is serious about becoming a Big Deal, and that always means compromise because all of a sudden, there are greedy people around with all kinds of expectations, usually centred solely on making money for them and their shareholders, no matter what the PR says
Naughton’s piece concludes that no one really knows exactly how big the Google operation is, or how much capacity it has and, “the interesting question raised by all this is: why the reticence?
“Most companies lose no opportunity to brag about their technology … Is this an example of Google behaving ultra-responsibly – being careful not to hype its prospects prior to an IPO? Or is it a sign of a deeper commercial strategy?”
The latter is what Simpson Garfinkel of MIT’s Technology Review suspects, Naughton says, quoting Garfinkel as saying:
“After all, if Google publicised how many pages it has indexed and how many computers it has in its data centres around the world, search competitors such as Yahoo!, Teoma, and Mooter would know how much capital they had to raise in order to have a hope of displacing the king at the top of the hill.”
And if truth is the first casualty of war, openness is the first casualty of going public, adds Naughton.
A Reuters story says here, “Google, which declined comment through a spokeswoman on Friday, could still opt to remain privately held, and nothing definitive has been disclosed about the timing, size or structure of any IPO.”
Let’s hope the Google Guys will be content trust their loyal millions of users to see that Google maintains its pre-eminence – no matter how much Micro$oft, Yahoo! or any of the other would be Kings of Information Retrieval try to usurp them.
At the end of the day, if Google is third, or tenth or 20th, so what? It’ll still make a more-than-handsome living for its owners and employees by offering a major service in which use of the word ‘integrity’ doesn’t produce fear and confusion.
And more, it would be a real tragedy to lose a company that allows it to implement the excellent PigeonRank system, and then to let it roll.
With truly creative mind sets like that, the Google Guys can keep on innovating and that’s what really counts.
And who knows where it’ll lead?
April 26th, 2004 at 3:19 am
Actually google has very often had to make concessions in order to meet business objectives. One good example is the way they negotiated being shutdown from inside the Chinese national firewall. Overall, though I think the google public charter is something like “Don’t Be Evil.” Good article on it over at Wired : http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.01/google_pr.html
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