Is Googlephrenia curable?

• Position: SUTTON'S LAWS - Brief Article

Ed. Note: In conjunction with the publication of his new book, Corporate Canaries, Gary Sutton launched a blog commenting on business developments (http://blog.coughingcanaries.com). This is from a recent blog entry.

"Do no evil," Google preached. Unusual prospectus language. Lofty, spiritual expectations were set.

But when sales jumped during the IPO launch, the deep insiders pulled back the shares they originally planned to sell, letting others dump theirs. Then these deep insiders started unloading stock following the IPO, after the new sales figures were revealed and the stock had tripled.

Evil? Close. And, depending on which attorney general is running for office, indictable. Saving Google was the fact that everybody who sold in the IPO made gobs of money on their investments, instead of the triple gobs the real insiders knocked off, so nobody complained. But they noticed. Their animal was morphing.

Next the Google CEO went into a snit when CNET Googled his name, and ran a story using only the information that the Google search engine turned up on...