How much outage does it take to affect Google's IPO?

Yesterday I was surprised, like others, to find Google was not working. I retried time and time again and still it failed. Something interesting was happening, the world's favourite search engine was down. Such a happening was incredulous. And all this happened on the day when Google announced its IPO valuation.

Later in the day I heard news commentators join the two together and try to draw a conclusion that somehow Google's valuation would be affected. Well if that's true then such investors should find other advisors. The truth is that although many viruses are harmless there are some nasty & viruses out there and it does not matter how big you are, it is likely that you will toppple one day. And yesterday was Google's day.

The point is that the Internet is not a reliable place. By that I do not mean it is unreliable. What I mean is that outage will happen. It is a definition of how the Internet works. The Internet is designed to fail, but in doing so gains incredible robustness.

Come on, how many of you thought that Google would stay "down". Not many I am sure. The resilience of todays Internet connected society is built around redundancy. It is built around the fact that failure will happen, that failure is a fact of life. But who cares, let's learn the lessons, bolt down the hatches and get on with life. And what I would not give for a few shares in Google right now :-)

posted by Andy Swarbrick/PopG at 1:24