Saturday, October 23, 2004

The New York Times > Technology > Rah-Rah, Sis-Boom-Bah for Google! Or Not

The New York Times > Technology > Rah-Rah, Sis-Boom-Bah for Google! Or Not: "Such an enormous increase in the value of a company over a few weeks recalls the day in December 1998 when Henry Blodget, then an analyst for Oppenheimer & Company, famously predicted that Amazon.com, then trading at $240, would soon rise to $400. It reached that target in three weeks. Three years later, Amazon shares were selling for one-tenth that price.
'We have seen this before,' said Jake Zamansky, a New York lawyer who has represented investors who claim they were misled by brokerage firms. 'Google is another bubble that will burst. Next year we will bring claims by investors who were hyped to buying Google by analysts with a herd mentality.'
Still, Google is by no means like the start-ups that had Web addresses but no profits.
Its revenue is expected to be about $3 billion this year and its profit margin would be the envy of any company. Even so, skeptics question whether the five-year-old company - now with a total market value of $47 billion - is really in the same league as the world's largest media companies like the News Corporation, Disney and Viacom."

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