Google does another disclosure oopsy - but the news isn't all bad!

Google, admitted that they made a slip-up during presentations at its analysts’ day last week, when notes included with slides mentioned a forecast of $9.5bn in advertising revenues this year.

They issued a securities filing saying that it was a real oopsy because the sales forecast was actually created for a product presentation at the end of last year.

Google's stock fell and the press is making noises about Google's accidental disclosures damaging their reputation or at least posing some awkward questions about their (communications) management.

The bit that everyone seems to be neglecting is that analaysts are currently expecting Googles revenues to come in somewhere between $8-11bn. So $9.5bn is not nothing to poop at.

And the $9.5bn forecast is just for ad revenues. What happens if revenues from Google Video or Google Software or any other number of their reveneue diversification offerings kick in.

And everyone is aware that online advertising growth has to slow to a more sensible rate at one point. So it may as well be now. $9.5bn would represent 58% growth on last year. OK, so it's not the 92% achieved in 2005, but it's still a level of growth that every other company on the planet would die for.

I think what all this adds up to is that Google still can't sneeze without the world crawling all over them. That just proves how central they are to everyone's lives. But they do need to get their communications in check and the fact that they're hiring an investor relations person is a decent start.

Google has grown so fast that they are actually still in start up phase, but they have the revenues, market presence and profile of a large corporate. Their biggest challenge of all may prove to be their ability to behave like a corporate (management, processes, systems etc etc) while growing like a start-up.

Microsoft did it. So can Google. And their stock price will bounce back up. Just wait for their next cool announcement. At least all of this has ended up lowering overly lofty expectations placed artificially on the search leader by the markets.