It had to hap­pen, they couldn’t seem to hold off for much longer. The BBC has the story Google to sell $2.7bn in shares, so does Slash­dot: Google Files for IPO. Inter­est­ingly Google’s own press cen­ter is not yet car­ry­ing the story.

I only hope that what they are offer­ing is not the major­ity of the com­pany, that is, I hope that Sergey and Larry retain abso­lute con­trol. Some­how I doubt that! I think it would be very unusual.

There has been a lot of spec­u­la­tion about what a major­ity third party share­holder interest in Google will do to the value of it’s search res­ults. I think that mat­ters less than it did. They know they have been los­ing mar­ket share in the search engine arena and quite rap­idly in recent months. I believe they have star­ted to diver­sify and will con­tinue to do so. If they can get it right (and that is a big ‘if’) GMail will be a killer app. And I think with all the spe­cial­ized search engine and AI com­pan­ies they have been buy­ing they have some­thing stun­ningly clever up their col­lect­ive sleeves.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

update: Wow! I was wrong to doubt. It looks like Google will be buck­ing the trend and retain­ing abso­lute con­trol within the com­pany. This art­icle at Wired More Reas­ons to Love Google has the info and much more besides. From page two of the article:

A dual class stock struc­ture will keep con­trol of Google in the hands of its founders.

Some­time in the night, my simple page view counter passed the 1 mil­lion mark! That’s since 25/08/2002. I can­not be bothered work­ing out how many days that is but I’m impressed!

My real people vis­itor counter (as opposed to the page view counter which counts bots and crawl­ers and refreshes, etc.) also passed the 70,000 mark last night. That counter is a count of real vis­its by people (or at least web browsers run­ning JavaS­cript) and has been going since April last year (though I recently lost 15 days worth of stats in my server problems).

Sun Enters Microsoft’s Orbit

Strug­gling Sun Microsys­tems reached a sweep­ing, $1.6 bil­lion set­tle­ment with Microsoft and said Fri­day it plans to cooper­ate with its long­time nemesis, a com­pany it had branded an unre­pent­ant monopolist

Although I’d hardly call the agree­ment enter­ing their orbit. More like agree­ing to stop fighting.

“Our com­pan­ies will con­tinue to com­pete hard, but this agree­ment cre­ates a new basis for cooper­a­tion that will bene­fit the cus­tom­ers of both com­pan­ies,” said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief exec­ut­ive officer.

This, how­ever, is bey­ond my com­pre­hen­sion:

Sun, once a shin­ing star of Sil­icon Val­ley, also said it expects rev­enue for the quarter ended March 28 to be approx­im­ately $2.65 bil­lion. The net loss will be between $750 mil­lion and $810 mil­lion, or 23 cents to 25 cents per share.

How can you take $2.65 bil­lion in a quarter and still lose money?