Over at digitalpoint forums there is the single biggest thread I have ever seen on a single topic in SEO, when will the 2007 Q3 pagerank be?  Google are saying nothing and everyone is taking about the possibility that they will not do a pagerank update or that they are going to dump it completely. 

Everyone's knows it massively flawed and that as a core of there algorithm they are in a weakened position and they need to address it.   To me I would say that the wikipedia flaw is a much bigger concern is they want to return quality results but thats another post.

Pagerank does have a value beyond getting you serps, what it can do that very few other things can do at the same level is it can grab the attention of a boardroom member and get them to relase the necessary funding to do a good job.  This is critical for google to understand, over the past few years it has been used in countless boardrooms as part of a justification for expenditure on millions of websites and has become the boardroom benchmark that a huge number of directors use to see if there website is doing well or not.  Its become an integral KPI for web analytics and allows them to have a direct visible tangible benchmark that even the greatest technophobe can understand.

Company directors grab onto stats and hold them close to there heart if they are easily understood and widely accepted,  how many times have I had alexa stats quoted at me by senior business people despite the fact that we all know there are a pile of crap that are so easily skewed.  Herein lies the real critical issue in my view for google (whether they agree or not), basically they have a statistic that shown in masses of board room presentations keeping them at the forefront of the minds of the key decision makers.  If this is removed they create a void, a blank powerpoint slide that just waiting to be filled by a stat from someone else, be that alexa ranking, yahoo webrank or anyone of a hundred others, its a dangerous void to create and to me its one that if they make they will regret for a long time to come if it is not immedately replaced with something stronger.

I suppose the real key question here is do Google recognise that the presence on that boardroom slide is a huge intangible asset that they would do well to maintain or do they really still believe that Pagerank is still only in the arena of the IT bods and SEO's.