Google shares tank after disappointing financial report Google’s share price fell sharply after the company released results that underperformed market expectations, with after-hours trading seeing the stock price fall by nearly ten per cent. Quarterly revenues broke the $10bn mark for the first time – at $10.58bn they were up 25 per cent on the last quarter of 2011 – but this was …
It does not need to make money outside search. It protects search and the _HIGHER_ margin advertising revenue (the one which is tied to location, NFC, etc).
Job done. Scorched earth for 30 clicks around the precious search. You may not like it, but it is a viable business tactic (at least until the anti-monopoly people decide to have a closer look).
Not sure why there's a downrate for the above?
Have a look at Kodak to see why you need to keep up with technology trends and not rely solely on one product revenue stream. Kodak were just as arrogant as Microsoft about the competitors. Kodak were too reliant on film cameras. Microsoft are still reliant on Windows and Office and Google are reliant on advertising revenue.
Film cameras have gone out of fashion, Windows and Office are still popular hence why Microsoft is safe for now and Google's problem is switching search engines is pretty easy. It's just that the main competition is from Microsoft.
Compared to other tech companies, they seem to have a pretty good and consistent approach.
They have their core, they really invest buy/develop and bolt together as much as they can - give it whirl to see what the world thinks - and if the world doesn't like it they mercilessly can it and just add it to their IP stack - if the world likes it, they polish the shit out of the cracks until it all becomes seamless.
From being 'the best search engine', I now seem to use them for my mail, calendar, phone + most apps, browser, navigation, photo management, some payment processing - at this point they've pretty much got 80% of what I find myself doing whilst clutching something electrical.
Amazon still owns the 'buying stuff' with physical, kindle and audible. erm.. Spotify for music.. Steam for PC games.. OK, it would appear the main chink in Google's armour is flogging me media with the exception of Android apps - but to be fair, I've never noticed them trying especially hard to break into this market.
*Company B grows 25% and hits 200m in revenue*
<Analysts> This company is going great! We expect them to hit 2.5 billion in six months!
*Company B posts 300% growth*
<Analysts> We're very disappointed in this company. Why did they raise expectations so much?
*Stock tanks*
...What's worse is that I've actually seen stocks (maybe even Google's) fall because they -didn't beat expectations by more than people expected them to beat the expectations by-. Wrap your head around that one.
I also like the 'concerned that Google only makes money from advertising' bit. Are they concerned that Ford only makes money by selling cars? What's Google supposed to do - branch off into making grain elevators and corrugated aluminum siding? Of course, then I'm sure they'd be slated for straying from their core competency.
Whoever wrote about the rationality of the free market is a first-class doofus.
On the whole I agree, it looks mental on first inspection. But there is some logic behind it.
The problem comes on how geared the company is, plus it's assets. Google is highly geared on an aggressive and risky strategy, relying on one product in a notoriously fickle market. Remember myspace before Facebook came along? So any deviation from 'the plan' sees a disproportionate drop in share price.
On the other hand, witness Microsoft; 20bn a quarter, sales in 'core' markets down, outlook revised downward, but share price not as badly affected. They are better geared, improving profitabilty, they have a wider product portfolio, are actively moving away from relying on their previously core products and are being conservative with their outlook.
How many times have we heard of stocks increasing because companies lost less money than they planned to. Sometimes I've heard of stocks going up on ridiculous things like companies managing to more efficiently lose money and therefore losing more than they had promised to.
Wall Street is a bunch of idiots who don't have the slightest clue what it is they're actually investing in. Bottom line is... Google opens their accounting software and looks at the bottom line and sees they have plenty of cash and keep getting more of it. When they fail to get more of it, they conserve it until they increase their profits.
Who really gives a flying rat's ass less about what the Wall Street gamblers think... that is if they're even capable of it.
>Who really gives a flying rat's ass less about what the Wall Street gamblers think... that is if >they're even capable of it.
The problem is, in that circle jerk called wall street everybody cares about what everybody thinks... So when those rats start running away from a company because their magic 8-ball tells them the sky is falling, the stock fall and the company is killed, just because.
It makes my liver puke with hate every time I hear in the news that a company's stock fell or the price of oil went up "amidst fears of... " X or Y stupid conjecture. Someone cries "Wolf!" and those bastards spring into action with no reason or reasoning at all.
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit... It's the only way to be sure.
They have digitised the minds of two thousand market analyists and they use these virtual traders to run simulations to determine the effects on stock price of various corporate press releases.
1) Announce reduced profit prediction: Shares go down.
2) Announce greater than predicted profits: Shares go up.
3) Announce increased profit prediction: Shares go up.
4) Announce less than predicted profits: Shares go down.
Buy after (1), sell after (3), rinse, repeat, in a few years move to your own private island in the carribean. Rum, sea-turtles, dusky maidens etc... etc...
Yeah, but to change my car I have to pay tens of thousands of pounds. To change my search provider I have to type a different URL in my browser.
Welcome to the world of the web. Poducts aint sticky anymore.
They are already getting out innovated by Bing in the US. If you have any google stock I would sell it.
Still, they will go down in history as the company that developed the nastiest, buggiest, most insecure, least pleasent to use Mobile operating system in history (and I am including Win Mobile in the equation here). One for the freetard hall of fame I guess.
Hah hah, you guessed? :-) You are indeed correct. I dislike google with a passion. This is because as far as I am concerned they invent nothing, base their entire business model on skimming money of work that other people have done and then run around acting holier than thou making statements like 'don't be evil'
And then they do stuff like this to protect their monopoly. http://opengeodata.org/google-ip-vandalizing-openstreetmap
You suggest that OSM poses a material threat to Google Maps, and that Google decided that the best way to go about things was to get a couple of random dudes to change a few entries here and there?
I mean, you may look dimly upon Google's competency, but if they were that stupid, there's no way they could have picked a font for their logo let alone built a giant search company. And why would Google be threatened by OSM but not Bing maps?
The whole idea that they're behind this is just bizarre - like most conspiracy theories, the theorists obsess on building elaborate constructions showing means and opportunity, without considering whether the alleged conspirators actually give a damn in the first place. (A good example of this is 9/11 conspiracy guys who allege that the attacks were carried out in order for the conspirators to gain control over the people, when the mere ability to commit such a monumentally wide-ranging clandestine act itself indicates that the conspirators must necessarily already HAVE such control. And please, please, don't start talking about 9/11 now, this was just a convenient and accessible analogy, and I swear to god if people start yakking about 9/11 I'll remove this post and you'll look even loonier than before. Capice?).
Nasty - well, I agree to a point. Running a JVM (regardless of what it is called) per application instead of a single instance is nasty design. It is also a resource hog. It also makes the development of whole classes of software nightmare or outright impossible. Allowing the OS to kill any application on a whim and having to write apps which are ready for a cull any time is similarly nasty. All the quirks and idiosyncrasies of its audio, bluetooth, etc from a developer perspective are nasty as well. Ad naseum. Reading the Android SDK manual is just like reading the Win95 developers manual. For every rule there is an exeption and/or a corner case where it does not apply cleanly (quite often not described).
Most insecure - I beg to differ. A system that runs each application under a guaranteed different UID and guarantees day one that one application will have no means whatsoever to see another application private data is definitely more secure than something which runs monolitic under one UID (earlier Win Mobiles). As far as trojans, etc it is again not the system - it is the market + user. Google allows stuff in the market with no prior vetting and user's do not look at the permission list when they download or update. However, there is nothing in Android itself inherently which makes this easier than other OSes.
Least pleasant to use - that is not Google it is the third party applications and even there it still has to go a long way to compete with Windows proper. Ribbon UI anyone?
How so, pray tell - are you referring to the fact that with each iteration of/update to Internet Explorer, it becomes more or more difficult for computer novices to change to another search engine than the Bing that comes bundled with the Microsoft browser (which, of course, comes bundled with the Microsoft OS) ? And do you mean that this so-called «innovation» takes place in the US or that its fruits are restricted to users in that country ? In any event, US users don't seem to have noticed - according to StatCounter (http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-daily-20080701-20120120), Google seems to be maintaining its US market share of over 80 %, while Bing and Yahoo! both struggle to reach shares of 10 %. But admittedly, compared to the situation obtaining worldwide, with Google enjoying a market share of over 90 %, while neither Bing nor Yahoo! make it up till 3 % (http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-ww-daily-20080701-20120120), that obtaining in the US is far more pleasant reading for Mr Ballmer & Co....
Henri
Yeah, like the antitrust case, the who hah around them promoting sites that sell fake Olympic tickets, them copying great chunks of java in android, them linking their abomination of a social networking site to their monopoly search engine etc etc. These are just blips of course. And I am the one wearing blinkers of course.....?
First off, you really are a coward, an anonymous one even.
Second, look up the word 'case'. There is an antitrust probe/investigation/whatever you want, they have no case. They may have one if they find evidence of wrongdoing, or they may find that everything is within the law, or maybe something in between.
Third, you have *NO* idea how much innovation Google is driving. You are really utterly clueless. I'll give you some hints:
- yes, they buy companies with nice ideas, but the resulting product is at another level. Many companies do this, hell, look at many things Apple brings - all bought up and refined.
- Google staffers can work 20% of their time on personal stuff. Many/most work on open source projects
- Every year, Google pump large amounts of money into the open source community through projects like GSoC (summer of code), where students all over the world get money to work on open source projects in stead of flipping burgers
- Google is an active contributor to open source, pushing changes upstream and releasing code of new projects.
They could save themselves a shitload of money by doing away with most of this and just put the ad money in their pockets.
Hah hah Petur, keep on drinking the cool aid eh? The funny thing is that Google have people like you completely suckered. You probably think that you are their customer. Wrong. Advertising agencies and marketing departments of large corporates are their customer. You are the product. They make their money by selling personal information about you to the highest bidder. The more personal and private the information they can capture, the more money they make.
And the 20% of time their employees spend on personal projects (even if true, which I doubt) has not exactly resulted in much innovation in terms of products eh? Infact, if I owned their stock (which I do not) I would prefer it if they spent all day actually doing their job…
Now lets look at Google’s main products. 1) Internet Search. They did not invent this but to be fair they did (once) innovate here. 2) Youtube. They bought this. 3) Gmail – this was a copied idea . 4) Google Docs – copied idea. 5) Google Plus – copied idea. 6) Google maps – copied idea. 6) Android – copied idea 7) Chrome Browser – copied idea. 7) Chrome OS – commercial failure. 8) Google Wave – commercial failure. I could go on…….
As for code camp – it will be a tax write scheme. Most large tech vendors do some sort of program like that.
What Google are good at, and what you fall for, is PR and spin. They position themselves as an ‘open source company’ Yet the only open source stuff when it will benefit their commercial interests and drive ad sales. I do not see them open sourcing their search algorithms for example.
They use the term Open Source as a tool to fool people like you that they care about your interests.
The great thing about people like you is you spout such total waffle with completely over the top views that everyone can safely ignore them and actually think that some companies are really getting scared of the competition.
FUD just doesn't work like that any more - people already know what sort of company Microsoft are. People realise Apple have diverted from their strong UK and ID roots and have just decided that it is better to try to abuse due process and the legal system to bully foreign companies into defeat.
And like the street preacher who thinks he is selling the word of "god" whilst everyone around just sees a raving lunatic - your comments do similar.
Apple, Microsoft and Google all have great strengths as well as weaknesses, they all copy from each other and everyone else. They all do bits of innovation, bits of marketing, bits of good product, bits of bad. They are all aiming to be the biggest and the best. They all choose different ways of trying to achieve this. They all have shareholders who dictate a lot of what they do.
One thing, it seems, that Google don't do is encourage and pay bloggers and forumites to spread FUD.
You really think all users of Google services are idiots? That they aren't aware of the deal?
As for your replies to the stuff they brought: Just look at the state of things before they offered their services:
- Search: bloody slow and incomplete, hardly any filtering. I still remember the day I discovered Google Search, it was pretty amazing. Granted I find it working less now that they try to think for me
- Docs: no usable offering
- Maps: such a great improvement over other existing things
- ...
And do tell me of another company that pays 1000 students a full income to code open source?
Don't bother waiting for more replies from me on this thread, I think I figured out you're a troll anyway.
25% is not good enough.
50% is not good enough.
75% is barely acceptable.
They want short-term gains and they want them NOW dammit!
This is why we have the financial crisis, massive under investment in infrastructure, a lack of action on environmental damage, child labour and any number of other ills. Profit NOW and screw the long-term consequences.
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This is what's wrong with the economy. A company can be making billions in profits and grow 25% and still it gets looked down upon as a bad thing.
It's also because of this, I suspect, that companies like google do waste a lot of money looking for other things to make even more money and in the end just waste time on stupid side projects because they feel they need to impress the pants off of people that are just concerned with raising things up as fast as possible and dumping it when they're done with it.
"stupid side projects" like:
- SketchUp
- Google maps
- Streetview
- Picassa
- Earth
- .. etc
I don't know about you, but I don't think they're that stupid.
The problem with the suits in Wall Street is that they only see cold heart cash at the core of big business because that is what a lot of big business is all about now.
So we see one that, although has some dubious business practices (although they got nothing on Microsoft), are prepared to give back to the community. With others it is charity and sponsorship. With Google it is support for Open Source and real innovation.
Like it used to be said of Maggie: "knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing."
But the idiots who poorly estimate this stuff are still in jobs. Hello Standard and Poors et al, you rubber-stamping architects of the Exotic Financial Vehicles which crashed our economies.
All this shows is that right now market analysts are about as useful as Mystic Meg is to tell you the weather next week.
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