Source SF Gate

Tim Bajarin
President, Creative Strategies Inc.

In Silicon Valley's grand scheme, Google keeps the valley's legend alive. It mirrors the garage shop rags-to-riches of Hewlett and Packard, Intel's Noyce, Moore and Grove, Apple's Jobs and Wozniak and Yahoo's Jerry Yang and David Filo. It keeps alive the hopes and dreams of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and engineers by suggesting that they, too, could someday emerge as billionaires if they could only invent the next great technology that captures the hearts and minds of the ever-expanding digital universe of users around the world.

Its role in the world of technology cannot be underestimated. Its search engine places this technology at the heart of the way we find things in context in a truly unruly World Wide Web. By inventing a much less obtrusive way to tie advertising to search results, that makes advertising practical and in many ways a welcome part of the search process..

Craig Newmark
Founder, Craigslist

Hey, the Google guys are doing great, both from a technology perspective and how they're trying to do the right thing for their community. As companies get more successful and bigger, they often forget that their customers are people and should be treated as such. I can see the Google guys trying hard to remember that and to make their moral compass an everyday part of their operations, a la "Do no evil."

They were being really smart and fair with their IPO, trying to democratize it, to give everyone a chance. I really like that, since I figure the Internet should be for everyone, and this helps change things. Sometimes it's hard to do the right thing, but I figure Google's a pretty decent role model..

Chris Anderson
Editor, Wired magazine

Although I applaud Google's attempt to use its clout to try an interesting experiment with alternatives to the financial status quo, it was so badly handled that the results are ambiguous at best. More likely, they're counterproductive, possibly even setting back the cause of auctions.

By trying to change too many variables at the same time — challenging the convention of an investment-bank-led IPO, hugely increasing the usual number of underwriting banks and trying to come up with some novel auction rules on the fly — Google was bound to run into hitches.