Online search is expected to generate more than $2.5 billion in revenues in 2004. That gives an aggregate Market Cap. for all search companies of around $12 billion. Assume that Google gets 40% of this and Google would have a potential value of $5 billion.
But Google is perhaps different – it will win a battle with Overture for paid listings, and will dominate the search space – and search is the bedrock of the Internet.
Microsoft owned command line access to your own machine and built on top of that. Google owns the command line for access to other machines, a very powerful place to build a company worth much more than $5 billion.