danieljean - 8:39 pm on Jul 31, 2004 (gmt 0)

I think anyone investing in Yahoo or MSFT needs their head checked. Investing in Google is risky, gutsy but in my books it's not quite as crazy a bet.

There's a number of things that Google is doing better than anyone else. Hiring brilliant people, giving them 20% of their time to work on projects of personal interest, creating an outstanding work environment- it's no wonder they can create better things than Microsoft. Their understanding of usability- as evidenced by the simplicity of their interfaces- is exceptional.

One of the more technically impressive things is how they are managing their infrastructure. They likely have over 100,000 servers- and they're doing a damn good job of maintaining that many low-cost machines.

Google has a strong brand, marketing, usability and technical mojo. And they're not just a search engine: they're a technology company. They are spending massive amounts of money on R&D and have a decent track record of bringing some of those innovations to market. Orkut, Adsense and GoogleNews were personal projects. Yeah, some don't work out... and some make boatloads of money.

As to Microsoft's competition, I wouldn't be surprised to see a GoogleFox browser based on Firefox 1.0. MSFT has the desktop, but Google has people's attention. With gmail, Google might also take a chunk out of Yahoo.

I'll wait it out, until the short-sellers and the second wave of stock sales bring the prices down a bit. But it might not be as crazy a bet as some people think.