GOOGLEmania!

In the life of a company, an IPO is celebrated only once and then its whole world changes. On April 29, 2004, Google filed for an IPO, and then there was no looking back. Everyone and everything now is in preparation for “Going Public Day”. Different people at Google will behave in ways yet unknown to them, reacting to their new-found wealth. But one result is known the Google parking lot will showcase even more of the latest works of German engineering.

The financials are pretty impressive: almost a billion dollars in revenues in the last year, 1907 employees, profits in excess of $100 million and growing. After six years of focused effort to be crowned king of the search industry, all run on private investment and management, Google is ready to raise a serious $2.7 billion ($2,718,281,828 dollars to be exact - the value of the mathematical constant “e” - in true Google style) from the IPO and have a market capitalization of $20 billion to $25 billion.

Run Private, Go Public

Both the company’s founders, Brin and Page, intend to preserve Google’s innovation-driven culture by creating a dual-class system of shares with two kinds of voting rights. Class A shares, to be sold in the public offering, will have one vote per share, whereas Class B shares, held by the founders, executives and employees, will have 10 votes per share so allowing the founders to maintain their decision-making authority. This set-up also supports Google’s philosophy as stated in a seven-page letter by the founders - of creating a company which intends to stay in business long-term and provide “long-term” value, opportunities, success and growth to “make the world a better place.” The IPO is going to be run as an innovative online Dutch auction, which makes both the big and small investors compete fairly for shares, democratizes the IPO process and minimizes bank fees too. Definitely, not a traditional Wall Street IPO and definitely Google.

Cool Technology

Cutting-edge innovation has always been Google’s recipe for success. Technology such as “Page-Rank”, a unique search algorithm based on quantifying the number of links to a page, Web alerts, personalized Web searches, and its smart scheme “AdWords” of paid keyword advertisements linked to search results, has given Google the ability to outrun its competition at critical times. Also, running all this search technology, day-to-day systems management and caching four full copies of the Internet’s content using clusters of commodity hardware and robust Linux and Open Source software, has given the company tremendous cost effectiveness and a technology edge that is hard to beat. Google employs Linux for everything it does on servers and desktops for development, system administration, and research. Using the world’s largest Linux cluster, Google has also opened its programming interface so developers can query over four billion Web pages from their own programs.

Are We Ready to have Fun?

Life today without Google is unimaginable. Google has already become synonymous with the word “search” in the unofficial dictionary of the English language. Wall Street is infatuated, Main Street is excited and Silicon Valley is energized. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) website, which hosted Google’s IPO registration filing, is getting overwhelmed with hits. Once Google goes public, the search competition will intensify. For the first time, Google will have the challenges of intense scrutiny in a public company and, at the same time, it will have to maintain its flow of innovative technology to pulsate its engineers and balance sheets alike.

Google is already getting rated as being as relevant as Microsoft or Cisco. So, watch the IPO happen in the next few months. Hope you’re ready for Googlopoly!