The things that Google is good at – search, video, “organizing information” – can be done by other companies, but those things are important to the economy and not represented in the Dow right now. Adding Yahoo doesn’t make sense, nor does letting live.com hold the search banner when it has such a puny market share.

If American Express or Disney or McDonald’s disappeared, I suppose we’d muddle along okay as well. But how would most of our individual lives be affected if Google went away and took its share of the cloud (and the stuff we keep there) on it? For me, it would be more noticeable than not having a McFlurry.

The DJIA should be our industrial anchors that make up our economy. If Google disappeared tomorrow, would the world still survive if we all had to search using live.com or yahoo.com? I think so. Can’t really say the same for Cisco as they have a tangible product embedded into virtually every corner of the world and is powering virtually every type of business.

Cisco seems to make a lot more sense than Google as a Dow component…. although Google’s clever innovations are admittedly much more interesting and fun to play around with. Maybe revisit Google in 5-10 years, after a lot of their incubations have had time to succeed or fail.

There is time for serious market crashes. Then what will happen to Google. It too will lose its market capital value. Percentage wise it has done well. We cannot compare Google with Citigroup which is a penny stock only knowing how to burn cash of the poor people.

Google is still very young and has a relatively short history of growth. It could slow down, but so could Microsoft, Intel and IBM. But which tech stocks do a better job of being one of those sticks in the sand today? Google has, to use a different metaphor, been a bellwether stock ever since it went public. I suspect the WSJ editors would agree with your more cautious views, but I just think Google would make the average show more accurately what’s changing in the economy.

With the stranglehold they have over online advertising dollars, Google is going to be solid for a long, long time to come.

That said, I don’t think should be added to the DOW. Other software giants, techs have done fine on the NASDAQ. The DOW is gonna get worse before it gets better, and I don’t really think it would benefit Google tremendously to start taking trades there amid one of the biggest sell-offs in history.

10 years of results does not demonstrate sustained growth.

After a few months everything will be back on track.

All this recession is just artificially created bubble, which has to burst sooner or later.