Google goes public

Temerity:

ZDNet UK take: Having the temerity to take on Wall Street and explicitly set out to redraw the rules for doing your company's IPO, in an professed bid to empower the smaller investor and reduce the profits for vested interests in Wall Street, during the launch of an innovative West Coast technology company. And to do this after a generation of global investors have been fleeced by hordes of other innovative West Coast technology companies. See: Google's share giveaways may have been illegal

Naivety:

ZDNet UK take: Launching an exciting new email service in beta which involves targeted ads and hosted email without thinking through the privacy implications, and discovering that three other companies have already filed for the trademark "Gmail". See: Google faces fight for Gmail

Innovation:

ZDNet UK take: Having a culture that gives employees the chance to work on their own special projects, which bears fruit in new services such as Orkut and Gmail, and doing all that while keeping a laser-beam focus on a powerful, easy-to-use search technology that delights advertisers and draws in millions of users every day. See: Free Google email service to launch 'in weeks'

Imitation:

ZDNet UK take:When established and much less innovative companies such as Microsoft feel the need to copy what you're doing with late-to-market me-too products shamelessly copying the attributes of your core technology, such as its plain and simple white-page design. See: Revamped MSN search goes live

Bildungsromans:

ZDNet UK take: A literary term describing a story about a character's coming of age, or path to maturity, such as the American classic Huckleberry Finn. What happens when a couple of bright university students develop great search technology, dramatically grow their company, and then find that they have to play nice with the US Federal regulators if they want to ask ordinary people for money to invest in it.   See: Playboy sideshow fails to distract Google