Google is selling more than 14 million new shares, so a lot of attention has gone to the company's strategic plans and new product ideas. But I think the most important fact has not received enough play: the company's payroll has swelled from 2,600 to 4,300 since September.

It doesn't matter how good your products are, how cool your technology is, how talented your senior managers are, or how successful you have been before: this rate of growth is hard for any organization to digest. Especially since it's not simply to do something tangible like ramp up production of widgets, but rather to chase down nebulously defined gee-whiz projects. Growing that fast makes everything harder to accomplish.

Even if all of Google's projects were legitimate and intelligent and you needed 4,300 people to do them, the mere adjustment in internal dynamics will cause inevitable turbulence. This unwieldy largesse is the most important thing anyone needs to know about Google.