Arithmetic and Google's IPO

As the owner of a company, you cannot spend revenue, you can only spend profit. If you were considering the purchase of a Ford store, you wouldn't ask how many cars they sell, you would ask how much money they had left at the end of the month.

"Mr Jones, you're selling cars at $200 below cost. How can you do that?"
"Volume!"

It seems the dot.com bubble will always be with us! It does not matter whether Google can stay on top. No Search engine is going to generate revenues above costs sufficient to service $36b. There are too many cheaper Competitors in a very Buyer-friendly purchase market. lgl

Switching is incredibly easy for searching. Google came out of nowhere overnight, and it could be done to them, too. They're extremely vulnerable to someone else doing better searches. That said, they can try to stay on top and may be able to keep having the best technology.

In 1999, few people thought that Yahoo! would lose its place as the top search engine

No. Many people believed that Altavista was a superior engine that was likely to surpass Yahoo! as web users became more savvy.

Agree with Lawr. G. Lux.

I strongly contend that Google.com is in a very precarious predicament. so much so, that I’m appalled at the large number of presumably intelligent investors willing to pay top dollar for their upcoming stock offer. There are indications that the price may top $100.00 a share! That’s totally lunacy. Google.com is temporally fortunate that the majority of Internet searchers are unaware that other search engines are now equally as good. Once they do---Google.com will be just another good size player in that sector. Gosh darn it, what indeed did happen to Altavista? I almost forgot about them.