Business Channel 2007-01-14&16

What started as a small business in a dorm room is now a word in the English language. And Google has no plans to slow down. In October, the company paid $1.65 billon to acquire YouTube. In December, Google agreed to a partnership 1 with NASA to bring things like maps of the moon and real-time tracking of the space shuttle right into people's homes. At this pace, the stratosphere is the limit for the world's largest search engine.

It's the mark of a good deal team to make deals look easy, but I can assure you that there is a lot of hard work that has happened behind the scenes in any deals, especially in the types of magnitude we've seen in MySpace.

The analysts 2 that followed Microsoft beginning in the 1980s, they saw it play out over 15 years. And Google, we've seen this play out over 5 to 7 years. And that's, that's quite special. The speed with which Google has conquered the market that they sort of created is amazing.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page were graduate students in computer science at Stanford University when they developed a new search technology. The buzz of it spread through campus, and then throughout the country. In 1998, they drew up a business plan and raised a million dollars to get started. Google's market value now $150 billion dollars. Googleplex in Mountain View, California is the headquarters, but the company employs over 9,000 people worldwide.

Google has developed an intellectual advantage which is hard to quantify, and it's hard to measure, but it suffices to say that Google is the company of choice to work for when you are coming out with a PhD in computer science from MIT or Stanford and..,and any of the other fine intellectual institutions in the country.

By the fourth quarter of 2001, Google had turned a profit. The company went publi c in 2004. Shares were offered at $85 and topped $100 on the first day of trading. Last year, shares remained steady in the $400 range and even reached over $500. Google gets over 475 million users a month, but more than half of that traffic is from outside of the United States. The folks at Google don't talk a lot about future plans. They seemed to prefer the element of surprise.

If history as any guide this company will go through significant hiccups 3 and then the test will be how well they treat their employees. Right now, as far as their employers are concerned, as long as you want to exist in an intense environment, they almost can do no wrong.

As long as Google sustains the intellectual edge, coming up with new products and services that consumers want and staying the No.1 choice for consumers in search, there is no reason to believe that Google can't sustain this technological 4 advantage. Of course it has some fantastic competition with Microsoft and Yahoo gearing up to challenge them in search.


Vocabulary


stratosphere n. a very high position, level, or amount
He's now at the top of the political stratosphere.

gear up v. to get ready
Fast food restaurants are geared up to serve thousands of people daily.