Google's Sale of Its Shares Will Defy Wall St. Tradition

[NashVegas]

The secretive company, which quickly emerged as the most popular method for searching the Internet for information, plans to conduct an auction intended to make its stock widely accessible to individual shareholders. At the same time, it plans to issue two classes of stock so that the founders can retain far more control than is usually the case when companies are publicly traded in the stock market.

And the dry, legalistic language typical of financial documents was replaced, at least at the beginning, with something of a manifesto attacking Wall Street's traditions and the practices of most public corporations.

"Google is not a conventional company," the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, proudly wrote in a preface to the offering that they termed an "Owner's Manual" for Google's future shareholders. "We do not intend to become one."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/30/technology/30GOOG.html?hp

more analysis:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/30/technology/30value.html?hp

Wired decribes this as a 'middle finger' stuck up at Wall St:

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312504073639/ds1.htm#toc16167_1