I clicked the first link and it says it airs at 9PM EST
In the upper left it lists the normal play time, which is 10pm EST. The 9pm you see is for a special Sunday night showing, however that is irregular (I don't remember them doing that before).
Totally agree. I would presume, and of course it's just a presumption, that when they terminate someone's service they immediately offer a refund for time remaining. I didn't notice that mentioned in the article, but it would be the normal course for a service refusing to service a particular customer.
Certainly a return of money spent thus far on the game would be appropriate if Blizzard has violated its contract.
This is ridiculous. Really. Blizzard is hosting a game, and the sense of entitlement and ownership people seem to have over that game borders on delusion denial.
Blizzard can decide tomorrow that, for financial reasons, they don't want to run the game anymore. At the end of the month the servers are all going to shutdown, and charges will stop for all user accounts. Do you know what compensation the users are entitled to in this event? NOTHING. They are playing a game, and their agreement is nothing more than the ongoing providing of game services for a monthly charge. Blizzard doesn't have some eternal duty to maintain people's imagination that the game has become something more than it is.
Blizzard can wipe the world tomorrow.
Blizzard can nuke their servers.
Blizzard can deny service to any client, for any reasons. Imagining that they have to follow the letter of the TOS is ridiculous given that they specifically give themselves provisions to deny service to anyone, at any time, at their own discretion.
Of course all of this ignores the fact that Blizzard runs the game to make money, and as long as it is profitable they will continue to do so. They will also continue to punish, and revoke services to, individuals who they feel reduce the enjoyment of the game for other people.
Wow. You really have a bizarre interpretation of the scope of the contract.
If this individual were deluded enough by some of the misinformed posts on here to sue a service provider for deciding to stop accepting his money, his likely _best_ outcome is-
It's not as material what the nature of the activity is, as the terms of the contract, and the agreements and representations made by those offering the service. Blizzard agreed to the TOS as much as did their customers.
Blizzard's TOS agreement give them some god clauses that supercede all others. The standard "it's at our discretion to determine if you're in violation, and we can choose to terminate this agreement at our discretion". This is fairly standard service boilerplate, and it is standard that a service provider has every legal right to cease service. This isn't the questionable "our TOS give us rights over your firstborn" sort of clause, but rather simply "we have the right to sever our relationship with any customer, for any reason, at our discretion." There is no legal recourse against that.
The nature of the activity does matter when compared to telephone or cable -- both are often local monopolies, and both exist in heavily regulated spheres. The customer remedies that exist there are not available in other service markets.
If that is true, then I don't think the game qualifies as a zero sum system.
It isn't a true zero sum system, but it is in essence.
Think of this way: In studies on wealth, researchers have found that people's happiness doesn't relate to how much wealth they have, it relates to how much wealth they have compared to those around them. e.g. The rich guy in the rich suburb in the affluent town, who hangs around the country club all day, feels no empowerment by his riches -- it just makes him seemingly normal, whereas the guy making $30K in the poor, offbeat town feels like he's a king, proudly showing off the new used K car he just bought.
It's flawed, but that's the way humans are wired. We rate our own accomplishments based upon our peer group and neighbours.
Similarly, if you're working your ass of trying to level up, but you're surrounded by countless lvl 60 ultra-mages, the sense of accomplishment is vastly diminished.
The other day I was the victim of a new cheat I've not seen before...
That one has been around for a while, and I've been the victim of it. I'm a very vengeful victim, though, so I spend the next 30 minutes putting M95 rounds through the canopy of the chopper they're hogging. Given that voting on BF2 is a joke, not to mention that most users like poetic justice, I usually get away with it too. And when I'm kicked, or kicked and banned, for punishing an asswipe I pick myself up and go to another server.
It is odd that players in BF2 even care about stats. Apart from a couple of early on unlocks of marginal advantage, or if you want to jockey for the often empty commander position, I don't think it's much of an advantage at all.
So you're convinced that every person who accidentally triggers a TOS violation should be permanently banned from a service like WoW, even when
Firstly, we're of course hearing one side of the story. Talk to prisoners in a jail and I'm sure you'll find that a remarkable number of them are "innocent".
Secondly, how about some perspective: This is a game. Maybe it's a fun game, but it's just a game, a service provided by Blizzard for a fee. Feel free to read the TOS, but they, like virtually all non-essential service providers, retain the right to terminate the business with a client. In Blizzard's TOS it basically states that they have the right, in their sole judgement, to terminate accounts based upon TOS violations. They are, quite literally, the gods of WoW.
I for one, hopes he gets a good lawyer. Given that this is far from the first time I've heard these complaints, a class action suit against Blizzard may just be what's needed to shake things up.
You have got to be kidding. "This company refuses to take my money anymore! I'm suing.!" I marvel at the mindset that spurred you to even imagine writing that paragraph.
Whether his eyes were focused more on the tv screen next to his monitor than on to his monitor should not matter in this case.
It matters for two critical reasons:
It isn't in the spirit of the game to mechanically complete tasks for hours on end without paying any heed to the game
It would make it impossible to detect and punish automated tools if people could just say "I was looking at the TV for the past two hours"
If someone sat there watching television while mechanically triggering a macro sequence, that really doesn't differ in spirit from automated macros at all.
If you read TFA, he went through great lengths to attempt to resolve the issue with Blizzard, keeping his emails polite at all times.
I read TFA, quite evident given that I pointed out particulars in it in the post you replied to, and I wasn't convinced: Acting contrite and deferring to authority is hardly an extraordinary response for someone who has no cards left. Just because you continually call the office sir doesn't mean you're going to get out of the fine.
Blizzard ignored all his correspondance, and went for a permanent ban, apparently in direct violation of their own terms of service.
Blizzard deals in what is basically an addictive activity, so I'm sure they have a system to start auto-ignoring emails after a final decision because some rather hopeless sorts go on a tirade for months to argue their cancellation, desperately trying to recover their virtual world. While people will claim otherwise, being mechanically rejected is actually less frustrating -- discouraging continuation -- than having a personalized reply to every plea.
Blizzard was WRONG, and paid no attention to a reasonable customer.
Their policies are for the benefit of countless other "reasonable customers" who don't want the deflation that automated tools cause.
In any situation which one party has vastly superior authority and little chance of penalized. Don't expect them to act in a reasonable manner.
I guess it depends upon your definition of reasonable.
In this case they actively pissed off a customer, terminating the account of a paying subscriber, because they felt that his actions were detrimental to the rest of the community. His actions had nothing to do with Linux, but rather were the result of what appeared to be automated activity (which could have been that a user saw him there stat padding for hours, complained, and then an admin trying conversing with him to find the character just mechanically repeating the same steps). Reading his account, it sounds like he configured a variety of complex activities as macros on his keyboard, and just sat there repeating them ad nauseam for hours while he did other things (fun!), doing this largely automated activity for his own gain. Given that MMMORPGs are somewhat of a zero sum affair, this means that it's at the cost of other players.
I'm actually amazed that the company acted so responsibly. It would have been easy to just backtrack and forgive and forget, but they forged ahead, making an enemy and losing a customer, to try to maintain the "rules of the land". Good for them.
I should also say that the individual in question might want to learn why "the right to silence" can be an important trait. He completely indicted himself in his emails ("so I was sitting her occasionally triggering macros while I watched TV...").
Did Google open up some kind of authentication API while I was sleeping?
It looks like it's entirely bogus - you enter your gmail account and it emails you a password each time you want to access the site. You recover the password, enter it on the site, and that's your logon. Not really sure what it has to do with gmail, as the same mechanism could apply to any email address.
When you were 17, what did you have to show for yourself?
Not only did I have some very impressive projects when I was 17, but I didn't have libraries of Javascript and online services that I could easily "mash up", nor did I have libraries featuring every bit of functionality but the kitchen sink.
It's easy for a "kid" to hash together a site like this because it's largely just a case of stringing together library code and available code. I'm not trying to diminish his accomplishments, but let's keep some perspective.
And 2 hours after you cry like a little bitch about the moderation and the big-bad-slashdot conspiracy
Maybe you're confused, but I never indicted Slashdot, nor did I think it would stay at Flamebait. Nonetheless, it is amusing that there are the ravenous masses who instantly attemptto suppress counter-points, and who will instantly start trying to spin it as a win for open source that this happened in the first place. Both happened with such speed it was mind blowing.
30 seconds and my post got a flamebait. I love Slashdot.
Within the same 30 seconds a post appeared following mine comparing the fix (which has the massive complexity of deleting some log files) with Microsoft's WMF fix, exactly as predicted. Beautiful, and so predictable.
Invariably, a lot of the comments to this story are going to commend the team on the incredibly speed with which they've released a patch, and there'll probably be some comments comparing it to closed software. Yet another victory for the open source model!
Yet how long has this massive fault been sitting there waiting for the first person to discover it? How do we know that the public acknowledgement of it was the first actual discovery of it?
I believe Breezy was released in October, so for five months install logs have been sitting, world-readable, often with the root password. Surely in that time someone well less savoury motives did a simple grep of an install looking for the most trivial of faults.
Feeling confident in the speed of the patch relies upon the belief that no one with nefarious motives discovered it before a benevolent bug submitter did.
Ahhh shite....somehow I completely misread your post, despite coming back to it and re-reading it. You're right, the two trashy logo screens are completely unskippable time-suckers.
At least one company[J&J] puts the stockholders LAST in the priority list.
And here's where it gets circular -- just like Google choosing to corner the market by ultra simplifying their search page, J&J looks after their customers, employees, and the community...for the health of the company...to protect the investment of the shareholders.
Just because they gave you a list doesn't mean that it's legitimate, otherwise J&J wouldn't expect a profit on their products, would they? If they wanted to look out for their customers, they'd just give it away.
Are you talking about a console version, if one exists? The PC version lets you ESC out of the movies, even though it's bloody annoying having them play in the first place: I tried modifying the configs to remove them, and it did, but then punkbusters kicked me out the first time I joined a game, claiming I had corrupted data.
BF2 is terribly slow to get going, though. From the moment you decide that you want to play until actually getting into an online game it's like 4 minutes.
First, stock analysts do not work for stockholders. In general, they work for brokerage houses. I'm not going to try to fully educate you, since that's too big a job.
Wow. You couldn't have packed more ignorance into those few sentences unless you perhaps denied the holocaust in there.
Look, I appreciate that Slashdot has become the den of the religious zealots that see no faults in Google, and I'm sure the founders really appreciate it as they indulgently fly around the world in their 767. Keep up the good work, brother. ALL HAIL GOOGLE!
They've made their money. Now they're sitting down, all fat and happy. We'll see if the sells continue if Google's price drops too far.
Are you seriously trying to imply that the insiders are done selling, when the sells have continued from the removal of the trading block to the last submitted SEC insider sales report? Give me a break. I assure you that they continue to unload at a torrential pace.
You don't seem to be following the fact that Google isn't doing business the way that Wall Street expects. (Which is to say, reckless and fiscally irresponsible.)
I am amazed, and disturbed, by your enormously clouded, idealistic vision of Google.
If you're not comfortable with the opacity and the instability in the stock price, the solution is simple. Don't buy stock in Google.
Let me make this strong because the Google-fans have been falling over themselves to say this: ISN'T THAT THE ENTIRE POINT? Analysts are expressing distaste for the opacity of Google, and they're voicing their displeasure. The next step will be that they start rating Google unfavourably, reducing the liquidity of the stock and probably hurting the price (which hurts all of the unloading Google insiders).
Why do people keep saying this nonsensical bit of tripe? Is it a sort of "Don't dare criticize Google" sort of thing?
Traditionally, shareholders have weilded a lot of power over a company, because a drop in price significantly inhibits a company's ability to raise capital. The problem here is that Google doesn't need to raise capital. Let me repeat that, Google doesn't need to raise capital.
Google founders, insiders, and employees all like to "raise capital", clearly evident by the torrent of sells. Secondly, Google is almost certainly maturing, and that will mean mergers and acquisitions -- usually done through share equity -- COMPLETELY dependent upon the share price staying elevated.
Just because a company has enough money in the bank to pay the bills doesn't mean they don't care about share price. Google is certainly desperate to keep a bloated valuation.
You must be one. Stock analyst work for themselves. The provide their "guesses" and then want the companies earnings to confirm their predictions.
Analysts want corporate guidance because it's a bit of a window into inside information -- e.g. inside Google, they know far more than they release, but as it is they release this information in BAM all at once suprizes on earnings report days, exposing the shares to unnecessary panic/euphoria. Guidance helps even out and manage expectations, and to give a bit more transparency into the business.
No one likes that sort of opacity in a business, especially one with such a vulnerable stock price as Google.
The honesty in the IPO could have restrict the sale - it didn't.
Yeah, those poor founders, innundated with crazy money that they don't want. Thanks to them for not restricting it, which would have enormously reduced the liquidity and value of the shares. So incredibly selfless.
Slashdot Mirror
I clicked the first link and it says it airs at 9PM EST
In the upper left it lists the normal play time, which is 10pm EST. The 9pm you see is for a special Sunday night showing, however that is irregular (I don't remember them doing that before).
Totally agree. I would presume, and of course it's just a presumption, that when they terminate someone's service they immediately offer a refund for time remaining. I didn't notice that mentioned in the article, but it would be the normal course for a service refusing to service a particular customer.
Certainly a return of money spent thus far on the game would be appropriate if Blizzard has violated its contract.
This is ridiculous. Really. Blizzard is hosting a game, and the sense of entitlement and ownership people seem to have over that game borders on delusion denial.
Blizzard can decide tomorrow that, for financial reasons, they don't want to run the game anymore. At the end of the month the servers are all going to shutdown, and charges will stop for all user accounts. Do you know what compensation the users are entitled to in this event? NOTHING. They are playing a game, and their agreement is nothing more than the ongoing providing of game services for a monthly charge. Blizzard doesn't have some eternal duty to maintain people's imagination that the game has become something more than it is.
Blizzard can wipe the world tomorrow.
Blizzard can nuke their servers.
Blizzard can deny service to any client, for any reasons. Imagining that they have to follow the letter of the TOS is ridiculous given that they specifically give themselves provisions to deny service to anyone, at any time, at their own discretion.
Of course all of this ignores the fact that Blizzard runs the game to make money, and as long as it is profitable they will continue to do so. They will also continue to punish, and revoke services to, individuals who they feel reduce the enjoyment of the game for other people.
Wow. You really have a bizarre interpretation of the scope of the contract.
If this individual were deluded enough by some of the misinformed posts on here to sue a service provider for deciding to stop accepting his money, his likely _best_ outcome is-
-getting a refund for a part of a month.
Wow. Godspeed to him.
It's not as material what the nature of the activity is, as the terms of the contract, and the agreements and representations made by those offering the service. Blizzard agreed to the TOS as much as did their customers.
Blizzard's TOS agreement give them some god clauses that supercede all others. The standard "it's at our discretion to determine if you're in violation, and we can choose to terminate this agreement at our discretion". This is fairly standard service boilerplate, and it is standard that a service provider has every legal right to cease service. This isn't the questionable "our TOS give us rights over your firstborn" sort of clause, but rather simply "we have the right to sever our relationship with any customer, for any reason, at our discretion." There is no legal recourse against that.
The nature of the activity does matter when compared to telephone or cable -- both are often local monopolies, and both exist in heavily regulated spheres. The customer remedies that exist there are not available in other service markets.
If that is true, then I don't think the game qualifies as a zero sum system.
It isn't a true zero sum system, but it is in essence.
Think of this way: In studies on wealth, researchers have found that people's happiness doesn't relate to how much wealth they have, it relates to how much wealth they have compared to those around them. e.g. The rich guy in the rich suburb in the affluent town, who hangs around the country club all day, feels no empowerment by his riches -- it just makes him seemingly normal, whereas the guy making $30K in the poor, offbeat town feels like he's a king, proudly showing off the new used K car he just bought.
It's flawed, but that's the way humans are wired. We rate our own accomplishments based upon our peer group and neighbours.
Similarly, if you're working your ass of trying to level up, but you're surrounded by countless lvl 60 ultra-mages, the sense of accomplishment is vastly diminished.
The other day I was the victim of a new cheat I've not seen before...
That one has been around for a while, and I've been the victim of it. I'm a very vengeful victim, though, so I spend the next 30 minutes putting M95 rounds through the canopy of the chopper they're hogging. Given that voting on BF2 is a joke, not to mention that most users like poetic justice, I usually get away with it too. And when I'm kicked, or kicked and banned, for punishing an asswipe I pick myself up and go to another server.
It is odd that players in BF2 even care about stats. Apart from a couple of early on unlocks of marginal advantage, or if you want to jockey for the often empty commander position, I don't think it's much of an advantage at all.
So you're convinced that every person who accidentally triggers a TOS violation should be permanently banned from a service like WoW, even when
Firstly, we're of course hearing one side of the story. Talk to prisoners in a jail and I'm sure you'll find that a remarkable number of them are "innocent".
Secondly, how about some perspective: This is a game. Maybe it's a fun game, but it's just a game, a service provided by Blizzard for a fee. Feel free to read the TOS, but they, like virtually all non-essential service providers, retain the right to terminate the business with a client. In Blizzard's TOS it basically states that they have the right, in their sole judgement, to terminate accounts based upon TOS violations. They are, quite literally, the gods of WoW.
I for one, hopes he gets a good lawyer. Given that this is far from the first time I've heard these complaints, a class action suit against Blizzard may just be what's needed to shake things up.
You have got to be kidding. "This company refuses to take my money anymore! I'm suing.!" I marvel at the mindset that spurred you to even imagine writing that paragraph.
It matters for two critical reasons:
If someone sat there watching television while mechanically triggering a macro sequence, that really doesn't differ in spirit from automated macros at all.
If you read TFA, he went through great lengths to attempt to resolve the issue with Blizzard, keeping his emails polite at all times.
I read TFA, quite evident given that I pointed out particulars in it in the post you replied to, and I wasn't convinced: Acting contrite and deferring to authority is hardly an extraordinary response for someone who has no cards left. Just because you continually call the office sir doesn't mean you're going to get out of the fine.
Blizzard ignored all his correspondance, and went for a permanent ban, apparently in direct violation of their own terms of service.
Blizzard deals in what is basically an addictive activity, so I'm sure they have a system to start auto-ignoring emails after a final decision because some rather hopeless sorts go on a tirade for months to argue their cancellation, desperately trying to recover their virtual world. While people will claim otherwise, being mechanically rejected is actually less frustrating -- discouraging continuation -- than having a personalized reply to every plea.
Blizzard was WRONG, and paid no attention to a reasonable customer.
Their policies are for the benefit of countless other "reasonable customers" who don't want the deflation that automated tools cause.
In any situation which one party has vastly superior authority and little chance of penalized. Don't expect them to act in a reasonable manner.
I guess it depends upon your definition of reasonable.
In this case they actively pissed off a customer, terminating the account of a paying subscriber, because they felt that his actions were detrimental to the rest of the community. His actions had nothing to do with Linux, but rather were the result of what appeared to be automated activity (which could have been that a user saw him there stat padding for hours, complained, and then an admin trying conversing with him to find the character just mechanically repeating the same steps). Reading his account, it sounds like he configured a variety of complex activities as macros on his keyboard, and just sat there repeating them ad nauseam for hours while he did other things (fun!), doing this largely automated activity for his own gain. Given that MMMORPGs are somewhat of a zero sum affair, this means that it's at the cost of other players.
I'm actually amazed that the company acted so responsibly. It would have been easy to just backtrack and forgive and forget, but they forged ahead, making an enemy and losing a customer, to try to maintain the "rules of the land". Good for them.
I should also say that the individual in question might want to learn why "the right to silence" can be an important trait. He completely indicted himself in his emails ("so I was sitting her occasionally triggering macros while I watched TV...").
Did Google open up some kind of authentication API while I was sleeping?
It looks like it's entirely bogus - you enter your gmail account and it emails you a password each time you want to access the site. You recover the password, enter it on the site, and that's your logon. Not really sure what it has to do with gmail, as the same mechanism could apply to any email address.
Sounds pretty bogus.
When you were 17, what did you have to show for yourself?
Not only did I have some very impressive projects when I was 17, but I didn't have libraries of Javascript and online services that I could easily "mash up", nor did I have libraries featuring every bit of functionality but the kitchen sink.
It's easy for a "kid" to hash together a site like this because it's largely just a case of stringing together library code and available code. I'm not trying to diminish his accomplishments, but let's keep some perspective.
And I doubt Flickr is losing any sleep.
And 2 hours after you cry like a little bitch about the moderation and the big-bad-slashdot conspiracy
Maybe you're confused, but I never indicted Slashdot, nor did I think it would stay at Flamebait. Nonetheless, it is amusing that there are the ravenous masses who instantly attemptto suppress counter-points, and who will instantly start trying to spin it as a win for open source that this happened in the first place. Both happened with such speed it was mind blowing.
30 seconds and my post got a flamebait. I love Slashdot.
Within the same 30 seconds a post appeared following mine comparing the fix (which has the massive complexity of deleting some log files) with Microsoft's WMF fix, exactly as predicted. Beautiful, and so predictable.
Invariably, a lot of the comments to this story are going to commend the team on the incredibly speed with which they've released a patch, and there'll probably be some comments comparing it to closed software. Yet another victory for the open source model!
Yet how long has this massive fault been sitting there waiting for the first person to discover it? How do we know that the public acknowledgement of it was the first actual discovery of it?
I believe Breezy was released in October, so for five months install logs have been sitting, world-readable, often with the root password. Surely in that time someone well less savoury motives did a simple grep of an install looking for the most trivial of faults.
Feeling confident in the speed of the patch relies upon the belief that no one with nefarious motives discovered it before a benevolent bug submitter did.
Ahhh shite....somehow I completely misread your post, despite coming back to it and re-reading it. You're right, the two trashy logo screens are completely unskippable time-suckers.
At least one company[J&J] puts the stockholders LAST in the priority list.
And here's where it gets circular -- just like Google choosing to corner the market by ultra simplifying their search page, J&J looks after their customers, employees, and the community...for the health of the company...to protect the investment of the shareholders.
Just because they gave you a list doesn't mean that it's legitimate, otherwise J&J wouldn't expect a profit on their products, would they? If they wanted to look out for their customers, they'd just give it away.
Have you ever played Battlefield 2?
Are you talking about a console version, if one exists? The PC version lets you ESC out of the movies, even though it's bloody annoying having them play in the first place: I tried modifying the configs to remove them, and it did, but then punkbusters kicked me out the first time I joined a game, claiming I had corrupted data.
BF2 is terribly slow to get going, though. From the moment you decide that you want to play until actually getting into an online game it's like 4 minutes.
In other words, by "free," you mean "a market that is compelled to operate in the manner that I think is fair." Interesting use of the word "free."
The Google-implant must be overpowered in you or something.
First, stock analysts do not work for stockholders. In general, they work for brokerage houses. I'm not going to try to fully educate you, since that's too big a job.
Wow. You couldn't have packed more ignorance into those few sentences unless you perhaps denied the holocaust in there.
Look, I appreciate that Slashdot has become the den of the religious zealots that see no faults in Google, and I'm sure the founders really appreciate it as they indulgently fly around the world in their 767. Keep up the good work, brother. ALL HAIL GOOGLE!
Indeed. Sells that have already happened.
They've made their money. Now they're sitting down, all fat and happy. We'll see if the sells continue if Google's price drops too far.
Are you seriously trying to imply that the insiders are done selling, when the sells have continued from the removal of the trading block to the last submitted SEC insider sales report? Give me a break. I assure you that they continue to unload at a torrential pace.
You don't seem to be following the fact that Google isn't doing business the way that Wall Street expects. (Which is to say, reckless and fiscally irresponsible.)
I am amazed, and disturbed, by your enormously clouded, idealistic vision of Google.
If you're not comfortable with the opacity and the instability in the stock price, the solution is simple. Don't buy stock in Google.
Let me make this strong because the Google-fans have been falling over themselves to say this: ISN'T THAT THE ENTIRE POINT? Analysts are expressing distaste for the opacity of Google, and they're voicing their displeasure. The next step will be that they start rating Google unfavourably, reducing the liquidity of the stock and probably hurting the price (which hurts all of the unloading Google insiders).
Why do people keep saying this nonsensical bit of tripe? Is it a sort of "Don't dare criticize Google" sort of thing?
Traditionally, shareholders have weilded a lot of power over a company, because a drop in price significantly inhibits a company's ability to raise capital. The problem here is that Google doesn't need to raise capital. Let me repeat that, Google doesn't need to raise capital.
e r/trans.asp?view=All&Symbol=GOOG
http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/invsub/insid
Google founders, insiders, and employees all like to "raise capital", clearly evident by the torrent of sells. Secondly, Google is almost certainly maturing, and that will mean mergers and acquisitions -- usually done through share equity -- COMPLETELY dependent upon the share price staying elevated.
Just because a company has enough money in the bank to pay the bills doesn't mean they don't care about share price. Google is certainly desperate to keep a bloated valuation.
You must be one. Stock analyst work for themselves. The provide their "guesses" and then want the companies earnings to confirm their predictions.
Analysts want corporate guidance because it's a bit of a window into inside information -- e.g. inside Google, they know far more than they release, but as it is they release this information in BAM all at once suprizes on earnings report days, exposing the shares to unnecessary panic/euphoria. Guidance helps even out and manage expectations, and to give a bit more transparency into the business.
No one likes that sort of opacity in a business, especially one with such a vulnerable stock price as Google.
The honesty in the IPO could have restrict the sale - it didn't.
Yeah, those poor founders, innundated with crazy money that they don't want. Thanks to them for not restricting it, which would have enormously reduced the liquidity and value of the shares. So incredibly selfless.