(Continued)     September 4, 2004 edition

Instead of telling employees which project to work on, Google leaves it for the employees to decide. ``We have a system that engineers can update to put themselves on another project,'' Page explained.

``Someone else might say, `Whoa, wait a second. I don't want people to be able to do that.' Well, it turns out you have two choices: You can try to control people, or you can try to have a system that represents reality.''

In unrelated news, Google's share price was $106.15 as of last Friday (Aug. 27), up 25 percent from its IPO price of $85. That sounds like a decent start for an initial public offering priced at $85.00. If the trend persists, we may eventually forget the words of doom visited on Google after the search company dropped from its target range of $108 to $135. Not only was the Google IPO declared a dud, complaints abounded that Google had chilled the tech sector, tainted other pending IPOs and stalled the stock market as a whole.

The bad news saturating broadcast and print media shared one thing in common. The primary source of Google-bashing was the investment community. The gloating was epitomized by coverage in The Wall Street Journal, where one hedge-fund executive crowed, "Wall Street wins again." True, the Googloids did not get their initial target price. And there were all kinds of complicated economic explanations for why. But years of following investment capitalists have taught people that they have a proclivity for perpetrating theories only they can explain. It might be called justification of existence.

In other developments, on Tuesday, there was more evidence that search engine 'Blinkx' is growing rapidly. Since its low-key launch at the end of July, some 800,000 people have downloaded the new technology. Hundreds of thousands more are probably using it after downloading Blinkx from other websites or from CDs cover-mounted on magazines.

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