While we’re still trying to shake the snow off our boots from a certain record-breaking blizzard, we thought we’d recap the weekend’s Google buzz: company co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page took a turn as Time coverboys (with CEO Eric Schmidt), scoring a feature article about the company’s success, their current strategies and their plans for the future.
Time’s story is a relatively sunny recap of Google’s history and climb to the top (with some fair questions about search privacy), including speculation that their stock price could reach $600 by the end of the year. It is accompanied by a somewhat goofy interview with Brin, Page and Schmidt in which the CEO tries to play straight man while the co-founders ham up their flip ‘boy-millionaire’ personas and appear distracted by building block toys:
…BRIN: I was hoping to build a Lego nuclear reactor, but I think I have a bazooka-wielding robot.
PAGE: Hey, I know. Let’s build Eric out of Legos.
…[TIME]: YOU TALK ABOUT THE NEED FOR TRANSPARENCY IN THE BUSINESS. WHAT PROBLEM ARE YOU ADDRESSING?
SCHMIDT: With all the headlines we’re making, we don’t want our announcements to surprise or confuse anyone. We don’t want our partners to think we’re competing against them.
BRIN [holding up some clear plastic pieces]: Look, I’m only using transparent Legos.
Etcetera. All the silliness had the blogs (for example, Traffick) debating whether this was Google’s ‘jump the shark’ moment. But a bearish Barron’s cover story says that the important question isn’t whether Google is jumping sharks, but swimming with them. Although Schmidt says in Time that Google projects an aura of disorganization to keep the competition off-balance, Barron’s (who tolled the bell for the tech bubble back in 2000) cites the breadth of Google’s far flung ventures – and aggressive competition in the rearview mirror from MSN and Yahoo! – as part of the proof that the company’s reach might be exceeding its grasp. While acknowledging that some analysts predict a Google stock rise in the near-term, their own opinion is that it could collapse to $188 by the end of the year, to just about half its current value (and on the heels of its 25 percent drop a couple weeks ago). Barron’s apparently got Wall Street’s attention this morning, as Google’s stock fell in early trading.
So who’s right? Search is booming, and Google’s already gargantuan share of the market has actually increased, as Paul Kedrosky points out: “total searches across all engines were up 55% year-over-year. According to [Nielsen/Netratings], Google now has 50% of the search market – up a gobsmackingly remarkable 5.7 points of share since the same time last year.” One thing seems certain: whichever way Google goes in the near future, we’re likely to follow.
