Google is NOT a Company

Is the title too scandalous for you ? Well let me tell you the story behind it.

When I was doing my Graduation in Mechanical Engineering , I think in the year 2005, there was an Inter-college festival in one of the other colleges of my state.


One event in that festival was arranged by the Management Department of the college (The dept. which gives out MBA Degrees). The event was to give a Presentation on "Your Favourite Company".


Me and one of my batch mates , Shailesh decided to enter this competition.
(As we needed something to write in our resumes as extra-curricular activites)


We chose our favourite company as Google.

Now around 2005, In small town India, in a Mechanical Branch, people did use Google everyday whenever they went on the internet.
But anyone  hardly knew anything else about Google.


We started err... Googling for Google... collected Articles from Business Publications, downloaded their Financial Reports and what not and finally were ready and raring to have a go at this presentation.


On the D-Day we took a Bus to the city where the competition was, and borrowed someone's bike to reach the college.


Now the event was supposed to start in the morning and there were about 15 Teams including us competing.
But due to some usual delays , it got kicked off around 4:00 PM in the evening.


Each team was given 10 minutes to present and then 3 minutes where the judges would question them.


All the other teams who gave their presentations chose Traditional Companies like NTPC, Hero Honda, Bharat Petroleum etc etc..


We were the last team who were going to get a chance to speak. Just before we went on stage, I was informed that due to lack of time we would only get 6 minutes to present as the event was running too long.
I had a looong heated argument with the organizers about this to no avail and decided to take some other routes to tackle this.


Our presentation started, we took turns in speaking. We discussed about the Origin and the founders of Google, the different popular Products Search, Google Earth and some obscure ones like Froogle.
We shared the mind boggling financial numbers and the profit figures etc etc.


We had an awesome momentum going and the crowd was loving us and paying complete attention to what we were talking about.


I had specifically added some very interesting and fun images of the Googleplex in my presentation, and as soon as the buzzer went off for the 6 minutes time out. I decided to go hostile and took the crowd on my side by informing them that I have much more information to share with them, but since there college was breaking their own rules and giving me less time I am not able to, and then I started walking off the stage.


At this point the judges got up and asked me to continue my presentations as the crowd had started booing them.


So I ended up giving a 15 minutes presentation which was supposed to be 10 minutes by rule and 6 minutes , if the organizers had their way.


When the results were announced, we received the highest points in Presentation Skills, Quality of the Presentation, The Data being presented etc etc.


But the judges then dropped a Bomb Shell on us saying, they can't give us the Top Prize for the competition as the topic of the presentation was "Your favourite Company" and they said: Google is NOT a Company.


GO FIGURE !!!


P.S. - The Judges were Professors who taught Management Subject to Post Grad MBAs.


P.P.S. - On a side note, after the event 2 very cute girls from the audience came up and shared their numbers as they loved our err...(No Idea what).. So all in all.. not a complete waste of time.. ;-)

P.P.S. - This is my 100th post on this Blog. Wooo Hoo !! .. Here's to the next 100 !!!

THIS IS COSMIC BLASTING OFF !!!!!!!!