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"Varian is an expert on what may be the most successful business idea in history: AdWords" How about selling oil?

• mahmud 17y ago
  for Wired, "history" == "since Google IPO".
  • TriinT 17y ago
    And that is why Wired seems to have become Gawker or Valleywag. There used to be some good journalism on Wired in the 1990s. Now it's a geek version of Vanity Fair...
  • zandorg 17y ago
    Yup, Wired used to try and predict the future, but now it just reports on the recent past.
• GavinB 17y ago
  This line threw me too, but success is something that can be defined in a lot of ways. If you define success in terms of growth rate and speed from idea to market dominance and massive profits, then Google is right up there. It all depends how you weight growth and total profit when you talk about "success." The growth curve of oil as a business took hundreds of years, whereas Google became a billion dollar business in a few years.