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Fortune Magazine Looks At The Chaos At Google

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One feeling that is creeping back up on me is that of a new dot com boom. I’m much more confident this time around that the venture capitalists and the companies who will benefit from their windfalls of money can actually deliver on the promises. This will be a good thing.
One of the reasons I’m feeling this is from quickly glancing at the magazine covers at my local newsstand this morning. BusinessWeek had a cover story on click fraud and Fortune Magazine for the month of October has Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, on the cover with title, Chaos @ Google – The inside story of anarchy at the $125 billion money machine. And why it’s all part of the plan.
Two key learnings:
One: always look online before buying a new magazine. It turns out that the whole article is available free online here: Fortune Magazine – Chaos By Design. Sure, I like having the glossy color pages, but I also have no issue reading a printed out version of a web page.
Two: $125 billion dollars. Let me frame this. Google started around 1998. That would be about eight years ago. They’ve built this massive empire in under a decade. If you’re thinking about the opportunities to truly create something unforgettable, think about Google. If they could… you can.
I have not read the full story yet, but at a quick glance, it seems to be a management piece on how Google is able to be so innovative. If I start seeing beanbags and Foosball tables in there, I just might retract my first comment about how this is probably not going to be like the first dot com boom (or bust).

3 comments

  1. There seems to be two (probably more) camps on this “new Boom”. The first is the web 2.0 everything is new on the internet all over again that seems to build the bubble. The second camp is still slow to adapt to not only the internets new found utillity, but the whole thing. I hear alot of people saying “See, the internet didn’t work after all”. Either way, i think investers are alittle more down to earth on this round of booming…. i hope…. can i get a foosball table?

  3. Hey Mitch. Nice to touch base.
    Google established a huge beachhead and has done a great job as a company in creating a valued service (and tons of shareholder value). It has matured very quickly, becoming a monolith in under a decade.
    Holes are starting to show. It is time for Google to start showing if it is different from tech giants of the past (Xerox, IBM, Microsoft) and evolve as fast as it grew.
    However, don’t know if they have an incentive to. I’ve written about this at http://www.vertabase.com/blog/perverse-economics-of-google/

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