Melanie Warner is attempting to divine lessons from Google's rise to the top of internet search. She offers platitudes like "Don't sell your soul to the highest bidder" ... despite the fact that, earlier in the story, she reports that Larry and Sergey had never wanted to start a company and were interested in selling the technology to Yahoo!, which wouldn't pay the asking price of $1 million.

Or this one: "Create a culture of risk taking." Warner notes how absurd Google's business plan was because no one in 1998 thought that they needed a new search engine: "Though the quality of search results was declining as the Internet swelled, most people didn't seem to care." Are you kidding? As soon as I found Google, I started telling all of my friends because my "other" search engine (Alta Vista) was so bad. Even if she is right, what is the lesson here, exactly? Go into markets that people perceive as saturated? Tell that to all of the online pet stores.

Then there is this gem: "It's all about the product." No duh! Warner writes, "This sounds obvious ..." Yes, it does. Next!

"Don't get greedy." And Google is an example of this because ...? Oh, right, because it didn't go public at the first possible moment. "All along the way, Google sacrificed short-term gain for long-term viability." I think maybe we have the wrong adjective in play here. If you are greedy, build a company with lasting value because there is nothing more valuable than that. Perhaps the lesson should be "Don't get anxious to cash out."

Next insight: "Keep your employees happy." Could this get any more pedestrian?

The best part of this article is the first paragraph:

When Omid Kordestani showed up for his new job as head of sales at Google in May 1999, the place was a mess. Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, ages 25 and 26, were working out of a cramped, disheveled office in Palo Alto. Their "business plan" wasn't much more than a series of notes scribbled on a whiteboard. Nearly all 12 employees had Ph.D.s in engineering or computer science, but nobody had a clue how the sophisticated search engine technology they were building was supposed to generate any money. The first MBA hired and the only guy pictured on Google's website wearing a tie, Iranian-born Kordestani was the startup's adult supervision.

This confirms the story I was hearing in the days just before the IPO documents were filed. My reading seems to have been off, however, as I assumed that Larry and Sergey were not at the helm, that the adults had taken over. All events since that time suggest that the two founders are firmly strapped into the pilot's chair together, with Eric assisting. That's five years for the founders to learn to run a company. Anyone nervous?

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