Nothing really to do with the Dutch as it transpires, but everything to do with the way www.google.com, the anti-establishment business where the main Internet product is absolutely free, has organised its initial public offering (IPO) rumoured to take place some time in late July, early August.

Anyone who started out investing in the late 1990's has heard all the stories, breathlessly touted, of new tech companies ready to provide 1,000 percent returns, year after year!

Prices on stock launches such as Yahoo.com made investment history in the height of IPO bidding war madness, as the market value of one share climbed the first day to more than $400.

Yahoo ran into severe cash flow shortages, did not turn a profit for a very long time, and almost went under. Today, Yahoo trades at about $32 per share.

How many still hold those original pricey shares? Google, on the other hand, espousing to good corporate governance, fair play in the workplace and humane consideration of its employees, has been wildly successful, has deep cash reserves, and is very profitable based on recent statistics cited in an article in September 2003, "Bloomberg Markets" by Anthony Effinger.

Google netted about 300 million dollars on revenues of almost a billion dollars. The triumvirate at the top (they write letters to shareholders and sign them Larry, Sergey and Eric) exhibit the sincerity of youth and one of the deepest of human virtues, in the face of cut-throat business world tactics, goodness.

To see their touching letter, go to their website where excerpts read like words of wisdoms from sons that every mother could be proud of. "Our employees, who have named themselves GooglersGoogleplex, are everything."

Google is organised around the ability to attract and leverage the talent of exceptional technologists and business people. We have been lucky to recruit many creative, principled and hard working stars.

We hope to recruit many more in the future. We will reward and treat them well. We provide many unusual benefits for our employees, including meals free of charge, doctors and washing machines.

We are careful to consider the long term advantages to the company of these benefits.

Expect us to add benefits rather than pare them down over time. We believe it is easy to be penny wise and pound foolish with respect to benefits that can save employees considerable time and improve their health and productivity.

"When Sergey and I founded Google, we hoped, but did not expect, it would reach its current size and influence. Our intense and enduring interest was to objectively help people find information efficiently. We also believed that searching and organising all the world's information was an unusually important task that should be carried out by a company that is trustworthy and interested in the public good.

We believe a well functioning society should have abundant, free and unbiased access to high quality information. Google therefore has a responsibility to the world.

Our goal is to develop services that improve the lives of as many people as possible to do things that matter. We make our services as widely available as we can by supporting over 97 languages and by providing most services for free.

Google's name is a play on the word googol, which refers to the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The company's mission to organise the immense amount of information available on the web draws more than 200 million users each day from all over the world, including Antarctica.

To date, they joke that no requests have been received from beyond the earth's orbit, but Google has a Klingon interface just in case.

When most of the rest of us were still figuring out how and when to get a job, or whether to wear those red kicky sandals with our new dance outfit, Stanford University Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin, 24 years old and 23 years old respectively created Google as a research project.

These intellectual giants through altruism and just plain hard work, have reached the entire world in just six short years. Is a picture still worth a thousand words?

Google makes money in a unique form of advertising, selling Internet AdWords at a price-per-click system. Incredibly cheap, say ten cents to Google every time a customer clicks on an AdWord, the potential exposure for the advertiser is almost limitless. If at least .5 of one percent of those who see the ad don't click on ad, nonrevenue generating advertisers are dropped. Google has turned the common upside down, words are now worth their weight in gold, said one seller of valuable coins.

With estimates of raising about 2.3 billions dollars, the shares will be offered in a dual-class structure, Dutch style on the Internet. In their own words, informed investors willing to pay the IPO price should be able to buy as many shares as they want, within reason and. It is important to us to have a fair process for our IPO that is inclusive of both small and large investors and crucial that we achieve a good outcome for Google and its current shareholders.

Our goal is to have a share price that reflects a fair market valuation of Google and that moves rationally based on changes in our business and the stock market.

Many companies have suffered from unreasonable speculation, small initial share float, and boom-bust cycles that hurt them and their investors in the long run.

We believe that an auction-based IPO will minimise these problems. Will it work? Will altruism conquer shareholder greed? Supposedly, this method will not boost rampant speculative buys and sells after the IPO. We'll just have to wait and see.

Ironically as fate has a habit of pointing out, in 1998, Sergey and Larry tried to sell Google to Yahoo for $1 million dollars. Yahoo just didn't think it was worth it.

Sources:

www.google.com and Bloomberg Markets September 2003

@EDITRULE: