• Yahoo and Microsoft. Google's chief competitors must have been laughing up their sleeves all the way through the IPO. Not only did Yahoo pocket almost $137 million in the offering, but it still owns nearly 6.6 million shares of a key rival. And it trails Google by only a slight margin in search market share.
• Clearly all the fumbling and bumbling during the IPO stripped Google of its aura of invincibility. That's good news for Yahoo and Microsoft, too, which is about to unveil new search technology that could help it gain on Google. I mean, really, whom would you rather bet on in this horse race--Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page or Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer?
• Goldman Sachs. The blue-chip Wall Street firm either passed on the offering or was bounced when it questioned the unusual Dutch auction the founders were determined to pursue. Either way, it avoided a mess and got some measure of vindication for the old-school, top-down offering process that has helped generations of Goldman bankers buy beachfront Southampton mansions and ten-room Park Avenue apartments.
• Institutional Investors. The big institutions and mutual funds drove down the price of this once-hot offering by going on a buyer's strike during the auction. That was partly Google's fault because of its many goofs, but I have no doubt some of these same institutions that boycotted the auction were aggressively buying shares at 85 Thursday morning.
• Stanford University. Sure, Google's price reduction cut the Harvard of the West's expected take from the IPO -- it got over $15 million. But it still reportedly owns more than 1.5 million Google shares and gets licensing fees from Google for its search-engine technology. More importantly, Page and Brin's shenanigans haven't dimmed Stanford's luster as a fount of technological innovation. The only hope UC Berkeley grads have for a Cardinal comeuppance is the annual football classic in November.
• Hugh and Christie Heffner. The ancient lion of the Playboy Mansion and his scion, the chief executive officer of Playboy Enterprises, enjoyed their 15 minutes of fame by publishing an interview with Page and Brin that, in an unintentional bit of financial naughtiness, prompted some finger wagging by the Securities and Exchange Commission. When the interview was eventually appended to the offering prospectus, it let brokers and traders say with a straight face that they had read Playboy for the articles. This was clearly the biggest coup the venerable skin mag had scored since the mid-1970s, when presidential candidate Jimmy Carter told one of its interviewers that he had committed adultery in his heart(hey! we all dream of a sweet piece of ass occasionally).
LOSERS
• Page and Brin. The two thirty-something wunderkind founders started off as Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger wannabes. But high-handedness quickly replaced high-mindedness, and by the time the offering launched they looked more like the Two Stooges. Chalk it up to arrogance, callow youth, narcissism and greed. The roughly $40 million they each reaped from the offering turned out to be less than a third of what they could have gotten. Don't cry for Page and Brin, though: Their stakes in Google are still worth more than $3 billion each.
• The Venture Capitalists. Silicon Valley heavy hitters L. John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital originally planned to unload more than 20 million shares each of their firms' Google stock during the offering. They wound up selling none and taking their chances with the rest of the hoi polloi -- surely a comedown for these ace rainmakers in what has been a desert for VC firms over the last few years.
• The Media. When Google unveiled its offering statement back in April, the media celebrated as if the Good Old Days of the Internet bubble had returned, engaging in a frenzied guessing game as to Google's true value. The Journal pegged its likely market capitalization at up to $25 billion. The New York Times said it would "easily command a market valuation of $30 billion, and perhaps much more." Barron's (alas and alack) said Google could go public "in the $40 billion to $50 billion range." And those frothy estimates were fairly typical. The actual market value at the offering: $23 billion, although it topped $27 billion at the close.
Not surprisingly, the same media that earlier had anointed Google King of the World now likened it to the Titanic. Report after report hailed the Restoration of Wall Street and proclaimed the death of the Dutch auction. Are they right? Who knows? But unfortunately the herd mentality is alive and well in the media.
• Small Investors. Either the Dutch auction is just too darned complicated or Wall Street intentionally made it so, but what started out as an exercise in shareholder democracy clearly went askew. The complex mechanics and the drumbeat of gloom-and-doom chatter helped the big institutions talk down the share price (see Winners) but left individual investors confused and ultimately out in the cold.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
