Google IPO concerns

I was reading the article "IPO Anyone remember Pets.com? Webvan? Apparently not" (read it here if you have not yet and wish to do so). It is another article warning us that investing in Google is frought with certain doom, and I have to bring up my own take on some of the author's observations. Google is VERY different than all those dot com failures. Google is extremely profitable. Pets.com never was and never could be (there is no way to sell and ship very heavy bags of cat food for less than one could simply buy it while shopping for groceries. You get killed by the high cost comparison or the cost of all that subsidized shipping). Google should be more closely compared to Ebay, and to a lesser extent Yahoo, and the like. Second, just because Yahoo and Ebay are off their one time over inflated highs does not mean Google is destined to rise to hundreds of dollars and then plunge. Those days are over as there is no dot.com boom and economic fervor to drive the inertia of that kind of trading. Again, they will probably perform more like Ebay and Yahoo today, which is just fine as an investment. Third, Google has more life than "search engines" or other "navigation" products because it is not one of them. Google stopped being a search company a long time ago. It is an advertising company. It makes virtually all it's money on selling very successful ads (AdWords) and these ads run on thousands of sites that have NOTHING to do with search (SFGate for example). Orkut is just another way they gather profile information to be able to charge higher ad click through rates. GMail is all about targeted ads and gaining more profile info as well. So, search is just one way to bring in eyeballs and serve ads, and they need search less and less as they expand their product line. I am not trying to jump all over the article, I like much of what this columnist writes, and I do think one needs to keep a level head in investing decisions. But I do think the concern I keep hearing that "Google is the second coming of the dot.com implosion" is not as well founded as people seem to think.

Saw Hellboy recently...

So I saw Hellboy a bit ago. I personally thought it was a lot of fun. I am only vaguely familiar with the comic, but it seemed to nail the various characters I was familiar with. Ron Perlman was born to that role. The thing that set it apart from most comic based movies is that it did not play like most opening stories. Most comic genre movies pretty much stick to doing an origin story first. This movie felt more like a sequel. Just jump in and tell a story with minimal set up. Made it tough to follow a couple of the relationships and know why some things were the way they were, but it did allow you to just tell a full story (more like X-men 2). Pretty gutsy move considering that Hellboy does not nearly have the fanbase of Batman or X-men. Heck, the next Batman movie is going to re-tell his origin again.