Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Just for your information, in case you don't follow these things: Google shares leaped by more than $23 yesterday to close at $172.43, more than double the $85 price of its initial public offering in August. "Soaring Profits Send Google's Stock Sky High", said the headline. Sounds a bit 1999, that. And in a 1999ish move, today's New York Times is quoting Mary Meeker, the Morgan Stanley analyst, who was such a bull on e-commerce IPOs back in the boom. Meeker is talking up the share: "If Google continues to execute to its market opportunities, we don't think the valuation will prove to be excessive. Execution is key."

Indeed it is. And nobody, but nobody is executing like Google these days. The new issue of The Economist is all excited about what the search engine is doing. Titled On to the desktop, the piece is subtitled "Once again, Google makes Microsoft look out of date". A taste:

"It gets worse for Microsoft. For months, Google has also been letting people test its new web-based e-mail service, Gmail. This offers new and more intuitive ways of viewing trails of e-mails. More importantly, it offers huge amounts of free storage, so that users can store their digital stuff on Google's server computers rather than on their own (Windows-run) PCs. Google, in other words, is attacking from every side. And there is more in the pipeline. "Google Print" is software that will help people search inside books (similar to a technology now provided by Amazon). "Google SMS" will help people to search the web from their mobile phones (Microsoft hates this too). Even a Google web browser is apparently in the works."

Time to get Google? The "lockup" agreements that keep Google's early investors and employees from selling their shares expire soon and on 16 November, an extra 39 million shares will come on the market. Over the subsequent three months, another 226 million shares will come out of their lockups. The 2005 Wall Street rally has begun.