Yesterday, Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) had its fifth birthday as a public company. Google, which has done nothing short of astounding in the last half-decade in terms of turning much of the advertising world upside-down, has defied many of the critics who probably never believed it would become as strong as it has in such a short time. That's because that kind of thinking was linear, and Google operated on an exponential scale using data and formulas to make things works quickly and efficiently, not haphazard management belief and inefficient decision making.
And so here we are. After the IPO that Google made accessible to anyone in a dutch auction back in August of 2004, the company's shares have made it all the way to $700 and above from their initial IPO price of $85, and closed yesterday at just over $443 per share after dipping almost down to $250 last December. Google has risen during the most intense part of a recession that's just now being acknowledged as being close to over.
What does that say about the company? No matter whether or not you're a fan, it's clearly doing things right and maneuvering in a way that most traditional companies don't. Google may be one of the, if not the most, smartest companies in the world because it bases so much of its strategy on data outcomes, not humans.
Google had to actually lower the price of its IPO shares due to criticism from Wall Street. Since then, it's pretty clear that Google knows what it is doing and where it is headed way above any brainiac analyst on Wall Street. Call it a comeuppance. The dot-com bubble had burst only recently after it went public and nobody knew where Google could go. Its shares went not only to the stratosphere but to another universe in the last five years, shutting up any doubt about its prospects.
So, the question remains this: Google managed to handily silence almost all its critics from 2004 with some of the most svelte decision making and products in the online world. Where will it -- and its shares -- be in 2014? If you bought GOOG in 2004 and sold today, you would have made over a 400% return. That could be just the beginning if you're long on GOOG from here on out.
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