Google Reports Increased Profits

typobox43 writes "According to Yahoo! News, Google has reported increased profits compared to the year-ago numbers in its first quarterly earnings report as a publicly held company. Google's revenue figures more than doubled, leaping to $805.9 million from $393.9 million. Google shares closed today at $149.38."

Comments

finance.slashdot.org

[Anonymous Coward]

Tune in tomorrow for the earnings reports from railroad and textile companies, and we'll discuss whether Amazon P/E ratio makes sense to hedge funds managers.

Thank you for being with Slashdot Finance. Buy LNUX!

Glad to see it

[Bill_Royle]

Despite the guaranteed criticism any company that "makes it" gets, I think Google's a good example of good ideas paying off.

Do I worry that they'll become another Microsoft or Oracle? Sure - but the best way to prevent that is to support the good that they do, while expressing directly to their feedback lines the things you don't like.

Thus far, they seem to be listening. I hope they keep up the good work!

Re:Good

[WIAKywbfatw]

99 percent of shareholders invest in a company for one reason and one reason only: to make money. They don't care about ethics, doing business in a friendly manner or the warm fuzzy glow inside that employees take home with them at the end of the day, they're only interested in the almighty dollar.

And, with the way that public companies have to operate by law in the US, that means doing whatever it takes: the boards of US companies are legally obliged to increase shareholder value as much as possible, and if that means no more Mr. Nice Guy, well, that's just tough for you, for me, and for anyone else that gets in the way of the bottom line.

Want to know the one way to keep a company from running into these sort of hassles? Stay privately owned rather than become a publicly traded company.

Of course, that means you can't properly compensate all the people (and venture capitalists, if any) that got you to where you are, and that presents its own set of problems including staff retention, but that's another story.

Bottom line: don't expect Google to be your best friend from mow till the day that you die.

Re:That's how IPOs goes

[hkmwbz]

In what way doesn't Google have "salable products"?

We are Google's product. We, the users of their free and popular services. And there are a lot of us out there. To me, Google Groups alone is invaluable in finding information. I use it several times a day.

And not only that, but people don't seem to be very concerned about blocking Google ads. They block banner as and popup ads, and all those nasty things, but Google's nice and unintrusive text ads are often let through.

I think you are underestimating Google's product line. You are one of its products, and Google is making money because millions of people like you and I use them, often every day. And as long as Google continues to be useful and offer something we want, we'll use it, and we'll spread the word, and more and more people will use it.

Don't take this as a troll, but..

[mumblestheclown]

• Closed source
• Multi-Billion dollar corporation
• Single point of information control
• Monopolistic Practices
• Secretive

Explain to me again why we should be cheering for them? Yes, it's a useful service. But MS stuff is likewise useful (despite what many of you think). So what if it's free for you to use? They still have a business model.

The best thing I can say about google is that it is unsustainable. Consider if the company is worth X billion dollars now. Well, even the most armchair businessman here will tell you that it wouldn't take a billion dollars to build a duplicate google system. It wouldn't even take a twentieth of that. And, while google is nice and popular now, if a better search engine came along with slightly fewer ads or whatever else perceived benefit, it would seriously erode google's traffic and cause actualy *gasp* competition and choice for advertisers.

and no, Yahoo and its overture systems are not an alternative.. they are a different service that targets different markets.

What I am suggesting is that google is selling a very generic, easily duplicatable service if somebody just got the funding to hire the right engineers. Google knows this.. that's why they are trying very hard to build all sorts of peripheral stuff like gmail and so forth, but the fundamental (99%+) business is still the search engine.

Re:Don't take this as a troll, but..

[mpoulton]

it wouldn't take a billion dollars to build a duplicate google system. It wouldn't even take a twentieth of that.

Really? They have a LOT of hardware. Lots of it. It's specialized, too, not all off-the-shelf stuff. More importantly, though, they have intagible assetts worth much more than their equipment -- code. Googlecode is about as non-trivial as it gets. To write it all, they have some of the smartest engineers in the world, and those engineers aren't cheap. Just as important as their technology itself, they have a massive user base that no other search engine can match without years of media exposure and word-of-mouth. They have an established reputation for fairness and avoidance of underhanded manipulation of results. I believe those factors make it impossible to compete with Google in the short term, even if their hardware and code could be replicated for a few hundred million dollars (a more likely figure than $50M).

Investors like short-term results. Try telling your VC's that they should invest $150M in a search engine project that replicates something already in existance, and won't be a moneymaker for at least 5 years. Think they'll bite?

Re:Good

[shrykk]

Yes, but part of the excellence of their product is that their ads don't piss us off. They realised you will put up with a few ads in order to get an excellent product and the day they sell out peoples private data or start bombarding us with pop-ups is the day we'll walk away.

Re:Yahoogle

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy crap!

Hey, if Windows can sue Lindows just cause it is spelled similarly, cant Google make them stop doing that?

I mean that is almost identical except for the logo change.

Where's the evil?

[JaredOfEuropa]

Closed source

So? I can see why they wouldn't want to be too free with their search engine technology. For once, someone might easily duplicate it, but more importantly, people might exploit inside knowledge of the system to bump their own webpages up in the ranking. Pageranking has to rely on certain 'tricks' rather than a fully objective and fair mechanism, and in this case, obscurity is way to go.

Multi-Billion dollar corporation

I don't see this as a reason to stop cheering for them. Nothing wrong with financial success.

Monopolistic Practices

The question is: do they simply have a monopoly on certain things, or do they use their monopoly to illegaly control prices or keep out competitors? For one, I don't really see where the monopoly is... advertising? I wasn't aware that advertisers have to go through Google these days...

Secretive

See my first point.

Google has a good and eminently useful core product which they provide for free. They make money off ads like so many free web services, but they choose to do so in a rather low-key manner. In addition they are starting to offer other free services, not by copying the competition, but by listening to the customers and raising the standard for everying else. Compare GMail to other free email services, and you'll see what I mean.

I guess many people are cheering for Google because this appears to be a company with good ideas, but also with good ethics, a drive to do things right, and attention for their customers; qualities that other companies often see as cost centers and something that they have to pay lip service to, to further their public image. With Google it seems that these very qualities are the things that made them succesful. It's nice to look at a company that works because of these good practices rather than despite them, because it reinforces our belief that the world works as it should, and that the good guys can finish first. (Yes yes, it sounds melodramatic, but I don't really have any other way to put all this).