Want to find out the biggest reader of this blog? I’ll give you a hint. The biggest reader of this blog doesn’t have a heart, does not care about the content, in fact my biggest reader doesn’t even have the slightest idea of what I am talking about.
That’s because my biggest reader is a machine. And not just one machine, but thousands of machines reading this site, posting comments, and generally poking around looking for new articles day and night.
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How about this for an idea, the more you know, the more skilled you are in applying your knowledge, and the more adept you are at persuading your colleagues, then the higher you will rise in an organization. These principles alone form the basis of a system of governance. There is no nepotism, and in theory no favoritism, since all aspects of projects and work assignments are decided upon by the voting members. Wealth in the traditional sense does not come into play, since power is directly proportional to a kind of ‘intellectual capital’ you are able to build. This model, as idealistic and pie-in-the-sky as anyone could imagine, has managed to crank out the world’s most successful web-server, and industry standard software libraries for 10 years and running. The organization is called the Apache Foundation, and they own the rights to the source code.
Have you ever wondered why Google won the search wars? Kind of important when you think about it, not just as a technology based success story, but now with larger economic implications. Google started as a PhD research thesis by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1996. By 1998 they felt they could make a go of it and so incorporated (still just the two of them) on September 7, 1998. Right from the beginning the Google search website enjoyed much success.
In August, 2004 Google launched its IPO, and sold off 19 million shares at a starting price of $84. At the time the IPO would raise 1.67 billion US dollars and the stock represented a total market cap of around $23 billion.
Fast forward to today and you will find that Google, the publicly held corporation, is listed as the “largest American company by market capitalization not listed in the Dow Jones as of October 31, 2007″ยน. The parent company has over 16,000 employees and keeps massive search engine server farms at 25 locations across the globe.
And that initial share price of $84, the one that Wall Street scoffed at? Over the last year Google shares fluctuated between $437 and $747 and the current market cap is at $159 billion.
The company is a monster. So how did it happen?