Thursday, November 1st, 2007
Making money without doing evil can be profitable
A lesson to others in the industry (including IBM) on value capture (without “evil”):
But the most interesting number is Google’s market capitalization — the value of all of its shares combined. Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider does a little fast fingering to calculate that with the $20 jump in Google’s stock in the last two days, its market value is now about $217 billion. That ranks it the fifth most valuable company in the country.
Most valuable are Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Microsoft, and AT&T. Google has now become worth more than Procter & Gamble, Bank of America and Citigroup. Google of course is a lot smaller than the companies it passed. P&G, for example, has nearly eight times the revenue and three times the profit of Google. But of course Google is growing far, far faster.
Now before all you Google-naysayers email me “yeah but Google did this ___ which is not good for _____ and they doing do enough ____”, stop and think: of the 5 named companies above, which one would you rank as the “less evil”? I hate to say it, but in any corporate environment, you’ll never find an “angel” but you can find some progressive, stars and I think Google is one. Just check out Chris DiBona’s interview on LWN for more.
Anyway, congrats to the Google company on a very aggressive growth curve.
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November 1st, 2007 at 4:02 pm
Luis said:
The revenue is much more relevant than the market cap. The market cap is as much a popularity contest as it is a real number, so not doing evil is a substantial plus when it should be economically neutral.
November 1st, 2007 at 4:03 pm
Nigeria paying for Mandriva, but still going to install Windows on Classmate PCs said:
[...] A real shame, just a shame. There are some business practices that I certainly could never support – see my lost post for a different approach: [...]