By eight o'clock yesterday morning the About Google section of google.co.uk still contained no reference to the impending flotation of the search engine's parent company. And yet I'd seen it as a rather frenzied item on the previous night's BBC News at 10pm and read extensive coverage in the newspapers on the tube to work. So much for the power of the information age.
In truth, though, every googlista will by now be aware of Google's decision to float, confounding the recent suggestions that it had got cold feet at the thought of the scrutiny and expectations that go with public life. Only four weeks ago I wrote of the silence on the Google float front as a further sign that the heat was coming out of the US equity market. If anything, the overall temperature has dropped further since, but Google will doubtless bask in its own microclimate.
When the Google initial public offering was first bruited last October, the Financial Times quoted an unnamed source speculating that the company could be valued at as much as $100bn (£56bn). It did not say whether he or she was an overexcited shareholder, employee or salivating adviser. Then and now, however, most estimates of value are around $25bn. Even at this more modest figure, salivation could be forgiven.
It seems pointless to highlight the reasons why the price tag is ridiculous. Valuing any company at, say, 10 times its current annual revenues or 100 times its net profits implies enormous faith in its ability to grow sales and earnings to fit its valuation clothing. The pointlessness, though, is because retail investors will set the price of Google shares, and you can be sure they will set it higher than high.
In its first public musings on the possibility of public life, Google suggested it would eschew IPO conventions and sell its shares directly to investors over the internet without the aid of investment bankers. It has kept to the spirit of direct sale, but failed to shake off the bankers.
Google shares are to be auctioned online, but bids must be lodged through banks and it would appear that the fees the company incurs will be as large as in a conventional float of this size. There are some things that even a company committed - without its tongue in cheek - to making the world a better place cannot achieve overnight.
We are told that shares in this auction will not necessarily go to the highest bidders, in the interests of a stable after market (for which read, to avoid a relentless decline in the share price from an over-hyped starting level). It is difficult, though, to see how this can be avoided given the litigious world which we all - but Americans in particular - inhabit.
Imagine the class action that could be created by those prepared to pay top dollar for wedges of Google shares only to find themselves issued with lower amounts at a lower price in the interests of a better world, especially if the share price instantly rises to a higher level than they originally bid in the auction. Apparently one task of the investment banks in the auction is to filter out such chancers. Fat chance. Investment banks have long got rich working for and with the sharp-eyed. They are hardly going to turn them away en masse now.
Indeed, the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether the misty-eyed dreamer with a $100bn vision for Google might be right - if only for a fleeting moment in the crazy history of a crazy stock market. Only a fraction of the company is for sale - at least $2.7bn worth of shares, that's all - and it is demand for this fraction that sets the company's stock market value, not the price at which someone would be prepared to buy the whole entity.
There is no point, then, standing in front of this runaway train. There will be opportunities to sell the shares short in time, but it could be ruinous to do so too early. Just be prepared, in the meantime, for endless water-cooler chat about what price to bid, how many shares you are allocated, and why you were such a fool to pass up the chance of such easy money.
Of more enduring interest is the question of what Google will do with its newfound corporate wealth, and whether the possibilities that it opens up will in any way corrupt the big, shiny heart that it wears so proudly on its sleeve. It is hard to export a corporate culture but, with an inflated value for its shares, Google, and its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, will surely be tempted to see whether they can do so.
Page and Brin cite Warren Buffett, the so-called Sage of Omaha, as an inspiration. He too is long on quirky, homespun, feelgood wisdom. But his has an edge of steel that has guaranteed the durability of his success.
· Edmond Warner is chief executive of IFX Group
