Google Valueless: Craziness from TechCrunch

April 3, 2012

I woke up this morning to an email from a colleague in Madrid, Spain. The goose has been chillin’ due to some excitement here in rural Kentucky. My colleague wanted to know if I had read “Why Google Might Be Going to $0.” Yep, zero, bupkes, zip, zilch.

The write up focuses on a patent matter involving Google and Here’s the paragraph I noted:

Guess what? Google’s patent lawyer is Quinn-Emmanuel. They are defending Google. Oh, and here’s something funny. Guess who Yahoo’s lawyer is? Yahoo is suing Facebook for patent infringement in the search domain. Quinn-Emanuel. So the same lawyer is both defending and accusing in the same domain. Someone’s going to settle. Everyone will settle. If anyone loses this case then the entire industry is going down in the same lawsuit and the exact same lawyer will be stuck on both sides of the fence. I’m not a lawyer but that smells. The trial is October 16 in the Eastern District Court of Virginia and will last 2 weeks. An appeal process can take, at most, a year. I’ve known Ken for 23 years. I’ve been in the trenches with him when he was writing what I thought was his useless software. I watched his company get bought and we’ve talked about these technologies through the decades. I’ve read the patent case. I watched Hal Varian’s video. Also look at this link on Google’s site where they describe their algorithm. Compare with the patent claim. I have a screenshot if they decide to take it down. $67 billion in revenues from this patent. Imagine: double that in the next ten years. Imagine: triple damages.

The idea is that Google is at risk for multiples of its revenue. I am no attorney. I assume that Google’s settlement with Yahoo with regard to the alleged infringement of ad-related systems and methods was made in an informed manner.

Can a court fine Google in such a way that the company has zero value? Sure, anything is possible. Is it reasonable to believe that Google gets a negative ruling? Yep, that’s the excitement of the legal system in the US. Is Google heading for a big zero? Not likely. But the write up is definitely something that warrants publishing on the day before April Fool’s moment in the venture capital sun.

Stephen E Arnold, April 3, 2012

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.