[asanwal]

Unfortunately, when people give you money (aka investors), they have certain expectations and you have responsibilities to them. And Google needs the money that the public markets enables them to have to fund operations, hire, grow, innovate, etc.

Again, this doesn't mean Google should engage in short-term B.S. that Wall St trades in, but they will need to be accountable to shareholders in some fashion - probably through detailing their vision. And they can articulate that they're managing for the long-term which is a great and desirable thing. But just saying "give us money, we're really smart" is not going to cut it. That's part of the hassle of being a public company - you are answerable to others.

Emotional arguments about why MBA/finance guys are bad may get folks excited but the reality is that both parties need each other. Thinking they don't is myopic, naive or probably both.

[infinite8s]

If you are a stockholder in Google, the easy answer to this is that if you don't believe in this "long-term vision" barely articulated by Page then you are free to ask for your capital back (by selling your shares). As Page and Brin are still the majority holders of google's voting stock they can pretty much do whatever they want (although it might not be in their long-term interest).

[JanezStupar]

I'm not arguing that MBA's are evil or something. I have just noticed that companies tend to overdo their financial engineering to a point where the company is a perfect financial machine but it is unable to produce anything worthwhile or innovate or whatever.

Entrepreneurs should treat finance as a tool not become a tool for the finance. What I mean is that sometimes you need to tell your accountant: Yes, what you propose makes sense from financial perspective - but it might severely cripple our vision and diminish our ability to reach our long term goals.

Nowadays to many treat finance as religion. And they don't even take a dump without their accountant.