Everyman - 8:39 pm on Jun 4, 2001 (gmt 0)

> from what I've read, Sergey and Larry aren't drawing large CEO type salaries, so I doubt that they will be fighting very hard to hang onto "their baby." Their payoff is in the back-end, and the likelyhood of seeing it has dramatically changed.

You are absolutely right about that.

From The New Yorker magazine, May 29, 2000, p. 98:

"Page and Brin each take eighty thousand dollars a year in salary."

Furthermore, I suspect that the VC folks arranged for the company itself to inherit the rights for any patents filed by Page and Brin. I also don't think that anything like a PageRank patent, assuming such a thing was ever granted, would be worth much in any case. Once granted, all you have to do to sidestep a PageRank patent is to change the algorithm somewhat. It's complex enough so that this would be easy to do.

The bottom line is that even Page and Brin may be ready for a way out. Get your Google T-shirts while you can!