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FBOP Class Of 2013
Industry Role:
Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: bumfuck, ky
Posts: 35,562
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second part
Quote:
Until a few weeks ago, Google seemed on track to achieve a mission of world dominance in areas that went way beyond the traditional internet.
Its stock market debut in 2004 was the most successful in history and the performance since has been even more breathtaking.
Its shares started life on the Nasdaq exchange at $179 each, valuing the company at nearly $100 billion - more than the entire American motor industry. Wise old Wall Street hands, who had seen too many bubbles grow and burst, shook their heads in disbelief - no company, they reckoned, could possibly sustain such a valuation on the basis of a mere $4 billion of sales.
But for every soothsayer of gloom, there were a dozen Google buffs who scrambled into the most successful market debut the world has so far seen. The shares moved up - and up, to an extraordinary $471. Even then there were projections of it hitting $600, and one broker projected a price of $1 000. He still does.
And then it stopped. The shares dropped 8,5 percent in one day late last month, knocking $20 billion off Google's market value - the first real setback since the launch. Its fans say it is only a breathing space before the next dizzy climb, and maybe it is. But there are plenty of others who say reality is catching up, it has made too many enemies and has simply grown too unwieldy and arrogant.
In other words, Google has experienced, in just a matter of months, the same phenomenon that overtakes all market leaders over decades. Now it has become the number one target for all the littler guys.
By an odd irony, General Motors, for many years the biggest company in the world and the symbol of American business and capitalism, last week announced record losses of $8,6-billion and sought relief from a pension fund deficit that totals an unpayable $64-billion. The phrase "What's good for General Motors is good for America" has long lost its resonance.
After GM, IBM was the big threat, its control of the emerging computer sector giving it a power far too dangerous for one company. The theory was that IBM engineers were developing computers which in turn would design even bigger computers and eventually create its own form of Big Brother.
Two years ago, what remained of the IBM personal computer business was sold to the Chinese for a pittance. Even Microsoft, the big bad bogy as recently as two years ago, has run out of steam - and threat. It too produced disappointing profit figures caused by glitches in the global launch of its new Xbox 360 video game system. Bill Gates, too, is fallible.
To Google it must seem that, after the magic honeymoon, the world is ganging up on it. Almost every area of its business is being challenged, every potential victim fighting back, every competitor gearing up and new ones emerging.
Here's how it works.
# Google is used by 82 million people a month, many of whom have it as the internet home page on their computer. Keywords are typed into the Google search page: in this case, those being sought are "China" and "democracy".
# The search speeds off to the nearest Google server, which may be in the same country or on the same continent. Google employs 4 183 people. Many of them are engineers who help to service an estimated 100 000 computers at 30 data centres around the world.
# The server sends the query - "China" plus "democracy" - to the Google Index, a database containing details of all the web pages on the company records. Instead of using huge mainframe computers, Google stores information a fragment at a time on thousands of linked machines, similar to ordinary PCs.
# The index identifies the pages it needs, and goes off to look for them. Google does not search the internet.
It searches one of several copies of the internet that it makes for itself and constantly updates. Each copy contains more than 8 billion pages and is stored, again a fragment at a time, on thousands of linked computers.
# Google's copies of the internet are made using its web crawlers, pieces of software that roam all over the net and send what they find back to the company. The pages are evaluated, indexed and ranked according to which words occur where, and how many other sites are linked to them.
# Google generates a summary of each page. It also uses more than 100 criteria to give the page a relevance rating between one and 10. A list is produced, to which is attached advertisements bought by companies wanting their products to appear beside key words.
# The results appear on the Google search page, back at the original computer, usually within half a second. This one took 0,08 seconds to produce 30 600 000 results. Google keeps permanent records of all the searches made.
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