Analysis: As a story to lighten Wall Street's summer doldrums, the Google saga has had it all - even before the company's founders appeared in the pages of Playboy.

There was the apparent hubris of a confident band of Silicon Valley technocrats who felt they could change the rules of how Wall Street handles initial public offerings. The fading excitement from what had become the most anticipated stock offering ever. The backlash from some quarters of the Wall Street establishment, where Google's founders were seen as arrogant amateurs dabbling in the art of high finance. And the regulatory and logistical bungling of the past two weeks.

Now, according to this script, comes the final chapter - the climbdown.

In fact, should Google price its shares at around the middle of the new, lower range it indicated yesterday morning, its debut on Wall Street will still go down as one of the most successful ever to come out of Silicon Valley.

At about $25 billion (€20.27 billion), it would give the company a stock market value that is still far higher than the $15 billion or so that was being talked about when the company first set out, last October, on its long and tortuous path to Wall Street.

The significantly higher value is the result both of a broader jump in internet stocks since then, as well as the revelation, from official filings, of just how profitable Google's online advertising business has become.

Yet the events of the past few weeks - intensified by obsessive interest from the financial media, particularly during the otherwise quiet summer - almost guarantee that Google's initial piblic pffering (IPO) will become a case study for students of finance for years to come.

To some extent, the short-term stock market background has helped to shape the eventual outcome. The chill that has crept over Wall Street since the end of June, particularly the technology sector, came just at the wrong moment.

Google's initial ambitious indication of where it expected to price its shares, at $108-$135, came in late July, even as internet stocks were sliding fast. Ironically, internet stocks have rebounded in the past week.

Shares in Yahoo, the company Google most closely resembles, are now back to where they stood at the time Google issued its initial price range.

But the damage had already been done.

With the stock market momentum apparently going against it, it did not help that the company set the absolute price of each share at such a high level.

That decision helped to discourage private investors, who had been expected to represent a large part of the IPO.

If Google's fear had been that private investors would bid too high out of over-excitement, it may well have succeeded in provoking the opposite reaction.

The intense media coverage of every twist and turn of recent weeks may well have contributed to the lack of interest by private investors.

Provided Google does not fall victim to a last-minute regulatory hitch, though, many of those twists and turns may amount to more noise than substance.