Google IPO Moves Forward

By permitting investors to submit bids for as few as five shares in its offering, Google has lowered a usual investment hurdle; on the other hand, the company has raised that hurdle with a share count that puts the expected per-share price more than five times the usual figure for an IPO.

For its part, Google has shown remarkable growth in recent years based on the success of its pay-per-click search-engine advertising business. But investors have increasingly grumbled over the last month about Google's stinginess in public discussions of its business prospects, a capital structure giving its co-founders unassailable voting control, and the richness of the proposed price range for the company's stock.

Whether this commentary will lead to an offering price below the proposed $108 to $135 price range, or whether it is simply trash talk that will be obliterated by big-spending bidders, remains to be seen. Injecting uncertainty into the whole affair is the expected bigger-than-usual participation, as far as IPOs are concerned, of retail investors in Google's auction.