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."

Comments

IPO=Death?

[chmod_localhost]

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.

Google's business model is like eBay

[Baric]

One reason eBay survived the dot-com crash was because their particular business model thrived on a large, centralized system. This creates significant entry barriers for other auction websites.

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?

Re:Be careful for what you wish for

[corebreech]

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.

Re:Wh

[s00p41337h4x0r]

For Google to stay permanently ahead of other search-engine technologies is almost impossible, since it takes so little--only a bright idea by another set of geeks--to lose the lead.

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.