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Will Google Become Another Netscape?
kaluta asks: "The Economist has a typically clear and concise story about bringing Google to the stockmarket. Basically, is it going to be the next eBay or Amazon, or will it 'simply be the next overhyped share sale to make its founders rich only to wither away miserably, either for lack of a sustainably profitable business model, or, like Netscape, because it finds itself in the path of that mighty wrecker, Microsoft?' Cool picture too."
It actually depends on the expectations of the shareholders, if an IPO leads to the death of a company. Normally a company is expected to be worth a certain multiple of its earnings (or better, the cashflow, because cashflow is difficult to forge). A normal multiple would be 10, which gives me a 10% return rate (I buy the company for 100 and get 10 out of it every year). If google has USD 100 Mio of earnings, it's worth would be USD 1000 Mio, if valued this way. This of course would be a fair value, because it enables them to pay their investors an annual dividend of 10% of the stock price, even without any growth. In this scenario, they could stay in their search-engine-business, something they can (obviously) handle successful. The problem is, google will not aim at a valuation of one billion, they will aim at a valuation that is about ten times higher. And that means, they will have to grow a lot in a short time, something that will propably kill them.
define google -- look at the top listing where it says: Web Definition.
Google has a couple neat things I never knew about like definitions..
define linux
define irc
It also has a calculator and unit converter:
1.21 GW / 88 mph
1 parsec in lightyears
Google is the same way and they are expanding the breadth of their content like Amazon. If you want to find something on the web, newsgroups or news, you go to Google first.
I don't see how anyone else can easily overcome the economies of scale that Google has already attained.
Is Howard Dean's candidacy doomed?
I personally have trust in Google for right now.
I have next to none. I have firsthand experience with how they treat objectionable content... they simply refuse to index it.
I have a site that I haven't even bothered working on anymore because of this: holocaustnow.org. Shortly after it was first created, I was both indexed on Google and archived in the WayBackMachine.
Then, about three months later, I was dropped from both sites. Queries to both organizations went unanswered. Subsequent attempts to have the site re-indexed proved futile.
It can't be an issue with the virtual hosting my service provider uses since Google had indexed it in the past.
And why the WayBackMachine would ever deign to remove something it has already archived makes no sense to me whatsoever.
So I am eagerly awaiting the day when Google falls. I see now that altavista is willing to index the site; this is giving me the incentive to come out with the badly needed version 2. The more diversity there is, the less likely the new Google's will try pulling shit like this.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
is it going to be the next eBay or Amazon
eBay has been a resounding financial success from day one, just incredible. You can't say that about Amazon, whose foray into profitability is somewhat recent, and nowhere near eBay's margins.
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Unconvincing. Search engines these days tailor their search results based on user input. The fact that Google is the market leader by such a large margin means that it has much more click-through data. It can use this advantage to return better tuned or more timely results. People's queries tell google what is currently interesting and important. NeoSearchEngine X doesn't have that same advantage.
They bought Blogger for the same reason. People hand Google information daily for which Your Friendly Marketting Division would kill.
Netscape has a long and sad story, a company that once made the worlds number 1 browser and supported a lot of (at the time) cool features, made a mail program, and also a html wysiwyg editor. Then MS decided to improve IE. Then MS include IE in Windows. Then MS decided to make IE part of Windows and at the same time Netscape decided to stop improving Netscape to compete and now IE is really the number one browser for Windows and Apple machines (although Safari is coming along nicely on the Apple side) Now Netscape is just kinda like a lost cause a portal without any of the subscribers companies lie Yahoo have.
Google on the other hand doens't make a browser. They are a search engine with a minimalistic interface and a tons of great abilities and scalability to their service. MS doesn't really compete YET - i'm sure they do have plans too since they want to rule the world. Still Google makes it's money from 1) companies buying ad space and 2) companies buying it's technology to use for inhouse - Netscape sold a browser, which eventually wasn't worth $20
Will Google's search software continue to be worth whatever their price is? MS, IBM, Oracle, all make DB's and compete, but they aren't going to put eachother out of business because IBM and Oracle continue to make a better product - if Oracle decided not to update after 10g after 4 years they would be gone - a victim to whatever MS and IBM had come out with.
(yes Netscape did update, but they didn't have the stability, features, or function with websites that IE now has...
Ave Molech Setting