I don’t see how working towards long-term goals and thinking about the shareholders. I think what you mean to say is that they are not looking after the short-term speculators.

The browser move is only illustrating that point.

They have long term hopes there and how much of those are going to happen we can only wait and see. But it’s sure they aren’t thinking about shareholders at the time being and don’t have to – they already made them rich recently.

On another note the story with the advertising on google.com has not happened quite as explained above.

Google execs did not have the slightest idea they will make money from search advertising, let alone on their own.

They were, in fact, on the verge of bankrupcy because they could not figure out how to bring revenue despite having an apparently excellent and popular product.

At the time Amazon.com has had a similar advertising program for product searches on their site and Google tried to advertise there in hope to bring in some cash.

Their first check, if I remember correctly was for either three hundred or three thousand dollars; I think it was more like the former.

Either way, until they got it they were seriously hoping this could work for them.

How and when they figured they could do it on their own I do not know.

But it certainly wasn’t “we’ll wait until the last moment and then do what we had in mind” thing.

It was a do-or-die thing, like with Altavista, and the outcome was decided in the last days.

At least that’s what I was told by a GOOG internal.

I think the stock is not cheap and, unlike Yahoo or Microsoft, has limited upside from here. I bet another bider will emerge for Yahoo in the coming months. Time Warner? Disney? Comcast? A merger with News Corp?

Also, in general you should real the book Built to Last. Google’s approach is similar to other companies mentioned in the book, such as 3M. Essentially 3M has made it’s money by allowing it’s engineers to develop whatever sort of product they dream up (within reason) rather than pre-deciding in a certain department the exact products that need to be met to meet a given market need to maximize profit. You know what I mean.

In general I think of it as a small scale example of free-markets versus central controlled economies. Google as a company is more of a free market, it puts software out there and sees what happens to it. In my opinion it is just too difficult in the software market to predict what is going to happen to do anything else.