Google: Changing Business or a Business in Need of Change?

There's an article over at Business Week today that talks about some of the problems Google is having dealing with investors and Wall Street. The article throws some heavy criticism at the company over the way that it relates to investors, citing issues like Google's preference for announcing news on its blog rather than via a press release and it's recent click fraud settlement that came on the heels of its claim that click fraud wasn't a problem.

The article's overall tone is that Google is a young, naive company in need of some serious growing up if it expects to continue its reign on Wall Street. The article also claims that the day is coming when Google's search technology will be no better than anyone else's and thus, Google will have to quickly learn how to rely on marketing if they want to continue to survive.

While I understand the author's point and agree with him on some level, I've also got to wonder how he can say those types of things about a company that's risen to a level where it produces more than $6 billion in yearly sales and has a market valuation of more than $100 billion. No company accidentally stumbles into that type of success. There's clearly been some thought and planning put into things.

So the question becomes whether Google will need to change the way it does business, or whether Google will become the face of changing business. When the bubble burst in the late 90's, it was clear that the "new economy" wasn't quite here in the way that we thought it would be, but the rise of companies like Google and Amazon from the ashes of that implosion makes it pretty clear that there's something to be said about a new way of doing business.