A basic tenet of Google's way of doing business is that it is not like other businesses. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin celebrated this quality in their famous letter to prospective shareholders before the company's 2004 IPO, and they promised to keep things that way. For example, Google's operations themselves are unconventional. One of the most fundamental precepts of modern management has to do with how to allocate resources: deciding which projects to pursue, where to spend money, when to take a pass. In fact, MBAs learn in their first classes at business school that resource allocation is a manager's most important task. Yet it's a concept that, while not exactly alien to Google's top dogs, isn't their highest priority. After all, why focus on allocating scarce resources when the resources aren't all that scarce? At the end of the first quarter Google had cash and other liquid assets of $12 billion; it generates almost $2 billion of cash per quarter.
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