digitalv - 3:47 pm on May 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

Scam? Come on, that's going a little far now isn't it?

Google is basically saying they don't want to play the games and do the little song and dance that other public companies have to do on a daily basis. Google has laid out the terms and basically told the big guys "This is how we're doing it, take it or leave it". I think it's a great idea.

Remember when Akamai went public? Back then me and a couple of other guys were going to pool our money and buy about $100,000 worth of AKAM stock first thing in the morning and sell it all before days end on opening day. Turns out we COULDN'T because all of the brokers controlled the stock, and even with $100k we were considered the "little guy" and didn't have enough money to buy in. You'll also remember that AKAM got up as high as 11 times the original buy price on opening day, and had we been able to do what we wanted with the times we had picked out, we would have walked away with nearly $900,000 on our $100k investment.

Anyway ... the point is that Google isn't letting that same thing happen. Anyone will be able to buy Google stock, the brokers aren't going to be able to hoard it so it can be sold only in large chunks. This is a good thing.