A basic tenet of Google’s way of doing business is that it is not like other
businesses. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin celebrated this quality in
their famous letter to prospective shareholders before the company’s
2004 IPO, and they promised to keep things that way. For example,
Google’s operations themselves are unconventional. One of the most
fundamental precepts of modern management has to do with how to
allocate resources: deciding which projects to pursue, where to spend
money, when to take a pass. In fact, MBAs learn in their first classes at
business school that resource allocation is a manager’s most important
task. Yet it’s a concept that, while not exactly alien to Google’s
top dogs, isn’t their highest priority.

After all, why focus on allocating scarce
resources when the resources aren’t all that scarce?
At the end of the first quarter Google had cash and
other liquid assets of $12 billion; it generates almost
$2 billion of cash per quarter.

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