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Google Chooses An Underwriter For Upcoming IPO
PenguinSix writes "Bloomberg and a bunch of others are reporting that Google has hired Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to arrange its initial public offering. This follows literally years of rumors and stories about a Google IPO. About a third of Mountain View, California-based Google may be sold in the IPO, giving the company a market value of about $12 billion, the bankers said." Google has become so invaluable to many people (like me) that they could probably raise just as much money with a blackmail scheme.
Is there anyone else here who is thinking that having such an invaluable internet tool now subject to the whims of public investors is not such a great thing? I would have rathered that Google stay private forever. That way they can make decisions based on what they think is best, not what will increase their stock price the most next quarter.
GMD
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While it's been our experience that a lot of tech companies run IPOs for fast cash and then wind up dying shortly afterwards (think of the dot-com bubble bursting), Google is more like investing in your infrastructure; it's an invaluable tool used by a huge segment of the net-aware population, and thus is probably a very safe bet.
For contrast, you can ask yourself how badly those investments in Yahoo! turned out, years after they started themselves as a category-based alternative to the search engines available in the mid-90s.
For those who remember how crazy the IPO prices were back in the dot come era, do you think google's IPO will be as crazy as, lets say, RedHat? I can't even recall the last IPO I've heard about.
Google will cease to be of any use once they have to satisfy a bunch of share-holder's demands.
They are only selling 1/3 of the stock, which means they will be maintianing full control themselves. I think we have much more to worry about from all the people trying to spam googles page ranking system. And even then, they seem to be making some progress with that.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Only a third of the company is being sold. The principals who made Google what it is will retain a controlling interest.
And since they'll have enough money to buy anything they could ever want for the rest of their lives, up to and including sending a probe to Mars, so long as they retain a controlling interest, it's highly unlikely that any price will cause them to fuck up the wonderful thing that is Google.
The management of Google is responsible for seeing to the best interests of Google's shareholders. So long as that team holds 51% of the shares, the interests of Google's geeky management are the interests of the shareholders.
It's called shareholder democracy. You vote what you own. If the thousands of fund managers and people who buy stock in the market (who will, collectively, own 33% of the company) try to change the direction of Google against the wishes of the few dozen founders and managers (who own the remaining 66% of the company), the owners of the company can tell the fund managers to go straight to hell, and there ain't a damn thing the fund managers can do about it.
It's strongly rumored that Microsoft made a buyout offer to Google, and was turned down. The founders of Google aren't in it for the $12B because there's not much that Google does that requires $12B of paid-in capital. They're going IPO to make sure they, and those who helped build the company with them, get a good payday out of it. They built something wonderful, and they're now being rewarded for their efforts, and they're doing so without compromising a damn thing. To all three of those things, I say more power to 'em.
That guy's site was unpopular, and now he is mad about it. Most of it can be attributed to his whiny attitude and immature approach to life. Google requires your site to gain popularity through channels other than itself.
Dear Google,
I have been seriously evaluating our relationship, and I've concluded you are not offering me what I need to be happy. I feel it is time for me to move on.
Yes, I know it's hard. We did have some good times together. Remember those times when you had "beta" in your name? Then came the time you bought and saved the Dejanews archive. I will always admire you for that. Then there was the time you added News search and Froogle. And all those times that you put those funny little cartoons in your name on holidays and on the birthdays of famous artists? Ahh, those were the days.
But those days are gone. Lately, you have been neglecting my needs as more and more results are being skewed by "link farming."
Then your eyes started to wander, and you started to pursue this illicit "shareholder love." You were wooed by this new lover that had a big wad of cash in his pocket.
Dear, no person can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other, or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. There are just too many search engines piled on the heap who whore out search results to the highest bidder. They think that they will never be caught, but eventually they are always found out.
You are just scaring me too much for me to take it anymore. I think it's best for both of us to find some therapy and move on.
Love,
eclectro
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I don't know about you, but I would certainly pony up 10 bucks a month if Google switched to a subscription model. For me, it is the most useful site on the Web. I sure hope the new corporate overlords don't screw it up.
They're only selling a third of the company.
The current owners will have absolute control, and won't have to follow the whims of anyone else.
That only works if the current owners always vote together as one entity. I doubt there is company that has ever put up more than 49% of their stock in an IPO. They always figure that they have 'absolute control'. But things never stay that way indefinitely.
Going public basically takes power out of the hands of employees and private investors, who probably care about the long-term health of a company, and puts it in the hands of the public (including market timers and mutual fund managers) who may not care what the hell happens to the stock price two quarters into the future.
GMD
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This is another netscape boys, and a sign that the powers that be have decided to cash out on google.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Regular mortals will be in on the IPO. Somebody has to pay for the fall.
I tried searching for reveiws of some products this holiday season. I have a method of keywords I used to get me past the ads. This used to work great. The google slammers (or whatever they're called now) are getting much much better as a lot of what looked to be reviews were just sites selling. Uggg. Often I would have to go to page 2 and 3 to pick up real review. I ended up using sites recomended by a friend and searched there postings.
I've started looking for/using other engines already. Sometimes when you get too big everyone tries to trick the service into selling.
Like open source preaches options are really important to keep things going.