Google's IPO: Buyer, Beware

For the past six months, Silicon Valley has been abuzz with the prospect of the first blockbuster public offering in the tech sector since the dotcom crash: the IPO of search-engine giant Google, expected this month. But Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin seem to be doing their darnedest to dampen the hype. The company last week gave an unusually bullish official estimate of its opening share price: $108 to $135 a share, or more than 150 times annual per-share profit. (Most large companies average about one-seventh of that.) Google watchers were split on the reason. Either Page and Brin...

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