Google IPO

Via Guardian Online, the CEO of Forrester Research sticks the boot into the pending will-they-won’t-they Google IPO.

Leaving aside for a moment that it was the likes of Forrester Research who were as responsible as the VC funds and MSNBC for hyping up the dot.com boom, he’s actually got a point about the fact that Google’s technology is a farily indefensible advantage:

Yes, Google’s scheme yields fantastic results. But the Web is inexorably dynamic. During the next five years, it will move from containing primarily file-based content (HTML pages) to containing more executable content (e.g., online gaming or new structure imposed by Web services such as XML). When that happens, the usefulness of link-based search will wane. Simply stated, Google is very much of the times, with no advantage in the more structured, executable Internet that lies ahead.

The usefulness of link-based searches are already adversely affected by movements in pages - Googling for ‘Chris Moyles’ pulls up a page of mine about two-thirds of the way down - but clicking through lands on an entirely different page since a minor cockup reimporting the Moveable Type database. I suppose eventually the Googlebot will sort this out when it spiders me again, but in the meantime there’s a semi-broken link polluting the results.

Having disposed of that, he opines about the IPO price:

So you get the message–I like Google. But the hype, silliness and rumored $15 billion-plus market cap of the company’s impending IPO beckons. Is Google’s search good? Yes. Is the company worth tens of billions? No.

Actually, I think that’s missing the point. The IPO price of Google will be a function of what people will be prepared to pay for it - and I don’t believe that everyone has recovered from the collective loss of sanity that the last stock market boom was. The fact that there is hype and silliness and talk of $15 billion suggests that there’s still plenty of people out there prepared to bet their shirts on the next big thing.

Filed under Them |