Strange days indeed at the Googleplex, the Silicon Valley home of half the assorted collection of self-styled geeks who make up Google’s 1 000-strong global workforce. For at least two years Internet pundits and analysts have been trying to second-guess when Google would list. With investment bankers drawn to the Silicon Valley headquarters by the smell of money and the cacophony of praise from loyal users, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page became adept at sidestepping the question.
Yes, listing was on the agenda, they routinely admitted, but it wasn’t imminent because it would distract management, force Google to focus on quarterly sales figures rather than improving its products, and destroy the fabric of its carefully cultivated culture. So by the time insiders actually confirmed that the company was on track for a £9-billion float as early as next March, it took everyone by surprise — a little.
People had been talking about it for so long that when it finally happened it came as a shock — and yet at the same time was completely expected.
So why now? As ever, the simple answer is money talks. Wall Street, having recovered from the destabilising effects of the dotcom crash, has arrived at the idea that a handful of online companies are going to be very profitable.
The casually dressed, nerdy but enthusiastic employees at the Googleplex will have to get used to a stream of soberly dressed suits marching past the giant multicoloured exercise balls, the lava lamps, the kitchen dispensing breakfast cereals and through the systems engineers playing roller hockey in the car park.
Bankers have seen the likes of Amazon, E-bay, Expedia and Yahoo mature into real businesses and they believe that Google, with its huge reach and loyal user base, could be the most profitable yet. And ”paid-for search”, which allows advertisers to buy sponsored listings alongside the search results, is flavour of the month.
Recently columnist Paul Carr highlighted the fact that Google’s grassroots fans, the bloggers and Net nuts who first kick-started its astonishing rise to the top of the search engine pile five years ago, are starting to revolt. The murmur that spread when Daniel Brandt started his Google Watch site, which accused Google of being secretive about its evaluation methods and unkind to bloggers, is reaching something of a crescendo. The company, which has always gone out of its way to project a caring, sharing image, ignores these complaints at its peril. A brand that flourishes on the Web can wither equally as fast.
Meeting Google executives face to face, you can’t help but come away bamboozled by their enthusiasm for technology, and wondering just how anyone could get quite so worked up about search algorithms. They display a touching affection for their company, bordering on the fanatical, that seems to be peculiar to Silicon Valley.
Many fear this enthusiasm will be compromised by their going public, and they’re probably right. In the past two years Google has continued to churn out new products at an incredible rate. Google News, an online repository for more than 4 000 news sources, and the shopping directory, Froogle, were launched in the past year. A quick glance at the Google Labs page, where the company road-tests its latest ideas with the help of users, shows that there are plenty more ideas where those came from. Users and company insiders fear that this innovation and experimentation will be sacrificed when the company goes public.
Google occupies a strange place in the affections of Web users. For a profitable private enterprise it retains an enormous amount of goodwill. This partly stems from the fact that, when every other dotcom was assaulting our eyes and ears with awful ads, Google didn’t spend a penny on marketing. Instead, it built its huge user base through word of mouth, allowing all new visitors to believe they had discovered the search engine for themselves. On top of that, whatever its search methodologies, they’re very, very good; there is still no other search engine that performs the task so speedily and effectively.
Although obviously funded very differently, Google’s closest cousin in terms of brand sentiment is probably the BBC. This is a remarkable achievement for Google, a business that began life in a Californian garage on begged and borrowed servers just five years ago. That success brings power, but also responsibility.
While self-appointed Google watchdog Brandt goes a bit far when he says ”Google is so important to the Web these days, it probably ought to be a public utility”, the company does now have so much power that we can only hope it doesn’t become corrupted by the chase to meet quarterly sales targets.
Whether it can retain that goodwill, stay on top of its technical game, continue to innovate and please Wall Street at the same time is the 64-googol dollar question. — Â