Month: October 2003

Actually, it’s quite boring. I won’t be buying any shares in Google because I never buy shares in anything. The only businesses I’ve owned shares in are my own. This probably explains why I wasn’t on Concorde’s final flight last week.

Anyway, Google is now such a household word that you can barely pick out the news about the IPO from the casual mentions of the brand everywhere. Try searching for ‘google’ at The Guardian, for instance.

This is an extraordinary brand, crossing over from weird, stripped-down, geek phenomenon to mainstream consumer fixture in three years.

Zoe Williams Googles herself. An unnamed correspondent in The Times scrabbles for laughs with Google’s translation services. Tom Reilly celebrates Googlewhacking in The Observer (Hey, I’ve got one of those, sort of).

Closer to the point, Vic Keegan, in The Guardian, laments the flotation and John Gapper in the FT worries about Google’s fragile technology lead.

People have a skewed, idealised image of Google. Businesses, once they’ve achieved a certain size, look for a stock market listing. That’s how capitalism works. Listed businesses get access to larger amounts of (cheaper) capital than private ones. They use it to build boring, mainstream businesses and these businesses create jobs and boost economies. The idea that Google might have avoided going public is a product of the twisted Internet imagination. A privately held Google could never really change the world. The obvious risks from exposure to the great unwashed are inevitably outweighed by the growth that access to all that fresh capital will produce. There is a reason why important businesses are listed on stock markets and Google – unconventional image notwithstanding – can’t ignore this.

Homework: make a list of very large privately owned companies (Bertelsmann?). Now make a list of really important privately owned companies – ones that can move cultures and economies over the long term (clue: there aren’t any). Google, like any proper business, consciously and unconsciously longs for influence, notoriety, longevity, scale – all of which flow from a stock market listing much more easily than from a nice, quiet, private life out of the mainstream.

Tom Standage’s survey ‘Beyond the Bubble‘ from the Economist a couple of weeks ago. You could use these, beautifully written, periodic Economist surveys to plot a pretty accurate graph of sentiment in telecoms and the net business over the last decade. I’ve kept them all, over the years – covering telecoms, the net and ecommerce.

In the old days (that would be 95–99, I guess) I remember ordering boxes of reprints from The Economist and sending them out with brochures for my web design firm. “Look”, I’d say, “it’s all real, It says so right here in The Economist!” Frances Cairncross, the Economist’s original telecoms seer (and author of The Death of Distance, a book that looked like a pretty sober evaluation of the net’s promise when it was published but these days looks more like a brochure for Bubble Inc.), wrote the Economist’s reports on the sector in those days. She seems to have staged a tactical retreat to loftier matters of social and economic policy now, though. Very sensible.

The Guardian’s pull-out survey on housing regeneration, from 24 September (not apparently online, though – unless you know better). Can’t really think of a bigger social issue in this country right now – we’re going to need 5 Million new homes over the next couple of decades – but one that media and politicians relegate to a NIMBY ghetto somewhere behind asylum and gun crime. Only the post-war housing crunch presented a bigger opportunity to rethink urban policy and that crisis brought us a wholesale reengineering of mainstream housing in Britain (epic slum clearances, prefabs, sprawling council estates, misconceived high rises and – finally – the mass privatisation of public housing under Thatcher). Why aren’t we paying attention this time round, though?