Google Doodles and the investors behind them

Google has long been known to beloved users and this writer as practically the only search engine with a personality, by tech and internet speculators as a business and industry innovator, and by early stock investors as a absolute blessing for your retirement accounts. Polling all 3 could give us a glimpse of the big G think tank and whatever big ad the company is expected to put out today at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and it could result in a nice price hike. of actions.

You’ve no doubt seen and enjoyed “Google Doodles” over the holidays, which refers to the cute, commemorative animations that periodically appear on the Google home page, just above the search box. Whether it’s Santa Claus in a sleigh over a house with Christmas lights spelling out the company name, or more recently, their joke April Fool logos (this year, Google “announced” on July 1 that they would be changing their name with Topeka, Kansas, citing, “Topeka voted to bring ultra-fast broadband to residents of the capital city through a program Google has launched; Google was flattered and wanted to return a nice gesture. Topeka, in return, would switch named after Google, Kansas “), Google loves to show those squiggles.

Google Doodles are back, but without a specific holiday or event to attribute the new doodles to, speculation has been sparked on the internet and rumors are flying. You may have noticed yesterday on Google’s homepage the flash animation over the search box of little colored balls flying in all directions when a mouse passed through them, only to settle on the familiar Google logo we’re used to. in boring and uneventful. days.

The Google logo is all gray on first impression. However, start typing and the letters will begin to color. So why so much effort?

Today, Google is taking over the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for a search event led by some of the company’s top executives and engineers. The event was announced last Friday, and through a Twitter message, Google hinted that the company has an announcement to make, but no one really knows.

It’s obvious to me that Google has some feature, product, or update that they’ll implement, and the squiggles and Twitter posts is their way of saying “it’s a big thing.” Animations have one thing in common: an example of how you can manipulate the interface and components of a web page without clicking anything. While it may be an old technology (Adobe pioneered Flash years ago), it is a technology that Google has never particularly embraced.

We’ll just have to wait and see what Google says at the Museum of Modern Art later today. In the meantime, it’s worth noting how powerful and disruptive Google has been since its launch in 1998 and its subsequent initial public offering a year later. The company’s share price has increased fivefold in just over 10 years, an almost unheard of feat of impressive growth.

Earlier this year, Google also changed the corporate landscape not just for American companies, but for an entire foreign country and for everyone who saw the debacle. The company made a bold and public exit from China, with CEO Eric Schmidt saying in a Newsweek article, “This is not a business decision. It was a responsibility decision,” after a hacker attack finally occurred. the private Gmail accounts of a human rights activist. traced to a Chinese university. The measure says a lot about how the company balances and behaves between the interests of its own principles and that of its shareholders. Moving out of China is a terrible move from a business point of view: they may lose 17% of their market share to rival Chinese search engine Baidu, which owns almost 70% of the market share, in which some they consider the largest market. in the world.

But from the point of view of ethics and corporate responsibility, it is an absolute triumph. On one of the last pages of its initial public offering, Google wrote a disclaimer that the company cannot always act in the interest of shareholders; There may come a time when you will make decisions based on your character, morals, and standards for doing business. Making the decision to get out of China and stand up for what the company believes is a breath of fresh air in our era of plagues of scandal or corporate irresponsibility.

Google shares are currently trading just a fraction of a percent, but if the weight of today’s announcement is powerful enough to move the market, intuition suggests it will move higher. I wouldn’t say that Google’s stock price is inflated, and it’s too early to assume that the news of today’s announcement is included in the price. In the end, regardless of the announcement and whether or not the stock is moving today, there is a lot to be proud of as a Google shareholder.