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Saturday, May 01, 2004 |
I had thought that maybe click-through ads—which can cost upwards of $1 per click-through, on Google—would be vulnerable to sabotage (you know, click your competitor’s add thousands of times; or, perhaps more likely, a malicious program that does it, for no reason other than because it can). But apparently this is not nearly the risk I thought it might be.
5:25:16 PM 
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I drafted the below Google IPO Predictions a few days before I actually had a chance to post it. Having read the articles that came out April 29, after Google's S1 filing, I see that I misjudged. The first-day run up clearly will not occur, because of the Dutch auction. Sounds good to me, at least in principle.
Some of the quotes from the S1 (written in the first person by Larry Paige) seem a bit over the top. But, all in all, refreshing.
I don't approve of the special class of shares with 10X voting rights. To me, that would be a deal-breaker. Way too much opportunity for self-dealing. I think Google's motivations are purer than most companies that do this, but I still don't approve. If they felt like they absolutely had to maintain control this way, how about a sunset provision--the special voting rights expire at the end of, say, 10 years?
5:23:41 PM
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4/28/04. The media is abuzz with talk of the apparent Google IPO. In the non-tech media, there is all the talk about how cool Sergey and Larry are because they show up to meetings in flip-flops and Hawaiian shirts. Completely boring to those of us who have been aware of the startup culture for years, and have long since understood that the young founders of successful companies can show up to meetings naked if they want to.
Some predictions, that seem easy. Google’s stock price will rise the day of the IPO much more than conventional financial theory says it should (i.e., more than about 7%). Let’s say 50% - 200%. 2 months later, it will be at the IPO price. 1 year later, it will be below the IPO price. Other companies will try to ride Google’s coattails in the IPO market, but will find that Google is an exception—not only will the absurd IPO market of the late 90s not re-appear (where prices routinely rose more than 25% the first day), it won’t even be a modestly strong IPO climate.
5:17:24 PM
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I used to be a pretty decent Access super-power user. I did a little VBA, but mostly just really complicated queries and reports. I taught myself SQL, but rarely wrote it; instead, I used Access’ query builder UI. Very, very powerful and quick. Fast-forward a few years. I don’t do a lot of Access work any longer, but I do hang out with real DBAs, people who keep SQL Server and Oracle humming. And I am repeatedly astounded at their willingness, even insistence, to use raw, command-line SQL.
These are people whose SQL knowledge dwarfs mine. But I have watched them, over and over, try to write a simple select query and not remember the table name. After a few tries, they fall back to doing a DESC on the database to get the table name. Okay, they’ve got the table, now they try to type the query, and it takes them a few tries of typo’ing field names before they get it right. This is all just so much easier in Access.
Recent versions of SQL Server do have what looks like a pretty good query UI. But a lot of DBAs seem stubbornly resistant to using it (oddly analogous to writers who insist on using manual typewriters). And on the Oracle side, I know there are third-party tools like TOAD, but they seem even more infrequently used.
5:15:35 PM
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© Copyright 2005 Erik Neu.
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