一封来自AlwaysOn的关于google的邮件

作者：康国平 | 2003年11月07日11时39分 |   【内容提要】
收到一个电子邮件，来自AlwaysOn的一个电子邮件，还以为是垃圾邮件，仔细一看，有关于google的标题，就认真看了一下，原来如此。google作为一种文化现象，值得我们去研究。别人有得天独厚的条件去做google这一现象方面的研究，我们是否也可考虑？
《互联网泡沫》一书的作者本打算不再写书了，因为写书是一次非常痛苦的经历，没想到因为google，他还是食言了。
标题：Help AO write a book on Google

Googling Google
Hi,
I have just decided to write a book about Google. When I finished my last book,The Internet Bubble, with my brother Michael, I can remember thinking, "Damn! I’ll never do that again!"
Writing a book is a very painful experience. And frankly, the only way I can pull this off under a tight deadline (I want it out beforeGoogle goes public), is to write it with AlwaysOn members.
As the folks who have been following AlwaysOn know, we believe that our competitive advantage is you. While John Markoff of the New York Times and David Kirkpatrick of Fortune may have bigger Rolodexes, and while they may often have better access to sources, we have thousands of members we can turn to get the real inside track. And that’s who I’m counting on.
Before I tell you how you can help, you might wonder, Why a book on Google?
First, I think Google is a great portrait of how the American dream is playing out in this century. Two Stanford students build a better mousetrap, attract top-tier VCs, recruit an incredible CEO, develop a unique business model, and help reinvent Silicon Valley all over again.
This in itself is a great story, but there is much, much more.
Having reached a billion dollars in revenues, Google now sits in the sights of the most powerful and crafty competitors on the planet: Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, and theAlmighty Microsoft.
My inside sources tell me that Microsoft recently offered $10 billion to buy Google, and the boys said no way. Bankers I know say that they are looking to fetch an $18 billion IPO valuation, so who needs Microsoft, right? We will see. And that is why this book needs to be written.
It will also be fun to examine the forces behind Google’s IPO. Did you know that Andy Bechtolsheim (Sun Microsystems co-founder) gave the Google boys a $100,000 investment before they even named the company? Just think how much money he is going to make on the deal. Did you know that the company’s two primary investors, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital, still own 9% of the company? Each. It doesn’t take a person smart enough to work at Google to do the math on how much these stakes are going to be worth after an $18 billion IPO.
As we say in the world of journalism, "This is a story that needs to be told."
And why, you might ask, should we be the ones to write this book? Because the last time I was hanging out with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, he once again reiterated that theinterview series he did with AlwaysOn was the best he’d ever done. We’re the right scribes for the job.
My hope, and my advice to Google, is to wait until August to go public. But given that the company has been actively talking to bankers, the IPO could be as early as January.
Either way, we have lots of work to do. So how about it? Watch for my regular posts, and let’s make this happen.
Note to members: AO members are encouraged to post their thoughts and reflections on what I write in this ongoing blog on Google. The goal is to work with AO members to write a book that gets published before Google goes public. If you have a really juicy scoop, please email it togoogle@alwayson-network.com. This email will only be read by me, and I promise to keep whatever you send to me in complete confidence unless you advise otherwise. Those members who either post or e-mail me inside information that I end up using in the book will be listed as contributing editors in the Acknowledgements section of the book.
Best,
Tony Perkins
_xyz