My oops on Google's oops in speaking out of school on merger

A couple of readers kindly pointed out that I made my own oops in my early August blog post: "Oops! Googleopolist's wife speaks out of school on pending merger."

I regret any confusion I created in mistaking that "Google product manager" Susan Wojcicki" was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin -- in fact she is the sister-in-law of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and also one of the earliest employees of Google.

I believe this correction ironically reinforces the core point of my important and revealing post on the pending merger -- that a very senior person at Google was publicly defining their market very differently than the way the Google lawyers are defining the market to the FTC.

• Ms Wojcicki talked out of school by saying to IBD that ""We are focused on the branding market" she said. "The online ad market is search and display -- and there isn't a lot after that.""
• I explained in my original post what a big problem this is for Google at the FTC.
  • In a nutshell, Google's lawyers are saying Google and DoubleClick are not
    competitors, while Ms. Wojcicki is bluntly implying that they are in fact direct competitors in the "branding market."

By way of background, Susan Wojcicki is the person that originally rented her garage to the Google co-founders where they devised Google's orginal search algorithm.

• And according to USA Today "she's one of its top-ranked executives, overseeing the crucial online advertising business as vice president of product management."
• In other words, she should know what she is talking about, when talking about Google's market.

Bottom line: An extremely well informed and important executive at Google has publicly established some critical merger facts that strongly suggest that the Google-DoubleClick merger would be anti-competitive and thus could be blocked by the FTC.