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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."
Atleast, they deserve it.
But I just hope that after all this, Google does not turn into yet-another-evil-corporation. A lot of companies started out with benign ideals, only to be corrupted as they grew bigger and were taken over by selfish MBA types.
I just hope that that the Google share-holders realize that what makes Google important are not just its ideas, but also the nature of their ideas.
Kudos, Google! You guys deserve it.
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!
Say you have a bank account. You are suddenly inundated with tons of cash (almost 2 billion dollars worth!) because you pimped yourself out. Then you stick all that cash in the bank account.
Even at a very low interest rate you can get a significant return on that money.
Obviously, you'd like to do stuff with it like buy jet planes for your managers and little stickers and baseball caps for your engineers, so your total return will be less than expected. But in the end, your huge pile of cash garners you a very nice gain just at basic interest rates. Couple that with some savvy investing (no-load mutual funds!) and you can have yourself quite a bit more "revenue" than before you sold yourself out.
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!
Step 1: Free search engine
Step 2:
Step 3: Profit!
Hell, it worked!
Not at all. Although advertising is still a major source of revenue, Google makes plenty of business offering enterprise solutions. For example, Amazon's new search engine is Google powered (previously reported here). I believe Yahoo's search engine has been powered by Google for a while now too, although I could stand to be corrected.
Google has region-based advertising :if I am looking for Korg from Switzerland, I'll get links to the music shops around me.
(This is the difference with many sites, incl. Slashdot who propose me some US-centric ads which I do not even care to read anyway because I am just so untargetted that it almost sounds unwelcoming.)
Anyway, it doesn't work that bad though I have one issue : people who buy advertising for their oiwn "search engines". At the end, you get their add for unrelated products and this is just polluting.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
As far as the search engine wars go, well, I think they've pretty much been declared the winner for now. It will take something very innovative and different from existing engines to have a chance at dislodging them.
So maybe that's where you see things like Gmail and Google Desktop Search coming from? Theres not a lot of room to expand in the search engine arena; not a lot they can do other than branch out into places where there's more room to innovate and expand.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Homer: Absolutely!
Zoom into Homer's brain, with a bunch of people in a dance line singing "We're in the money." Curtains open, revealing a roaring King Kong.
Homer: You heard the monkey, make the trade!
English is easier said than done.
To be totally accurate, GOOG soared even higher, to 161.79, in After-Hours trading. That's a nice 14.67% increase over the previous close.
- 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.
Google's recent run of new products and financial results is starting to remind me of that old Onion story about how "Starbucks Starting on Mysterious 'Phase 2'". All their outlets were closed and boarded-up and Starbucks management were readying their mind-control devices.
Now Google is getting ready for its own "Phase 2" having made me sign up for Gmail, that desktop search thing, etc.
Time to put my tinfoil hat back on.
Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
Has anyone else noticed the similarities between this and this? Hell, it even has the 'did you mean' and calculator features!
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
If your father's on the board, that narrows down your identity pretty well -- I don't think posting AC will help much!
Which leads me to suspect that either
a) Your father is not on the board because you are Supertroll (trolls at a rate of 3 billy goats per minute!) or
b) Your father is going to have harsh words with you if he ever reads slashdot
I agree with what you said, though. It's cute the way geeks randomly divide companies into 'good' and 'evil' while the companies just go on trying to make a profit -- kind of like primitive man personifying the thunder and rain.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I haven't seen anything that will create a more solid/reliable/long term revenue stream yet. I'd bet that the day they start charging for gmail or desktop search, their loyal customer base would desert them.
Perhaps we could open the floor to slashdotters - where do you think google could up their revenue stream without annoying us loyal customers?
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).
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
No, the IPO wasn't too crazy, but the newly projected stock price is well beyond crazy. I was viewing CNBC this morning and heard that one investment firm (I forget which) upgraded google's stock to perform in the $200 dollar range. That would give google a P/E of about 100. Such a price to earnings ratio is way too much, regardless of how well the organization is performing. Such speculation is the reason we had the late 90's bubble and the '29 crash.
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Rule #1: Analysts are full of shit. They always have been, they always will be. You should have gotten suspicious when you kept hearing 'headlines' about experts warnings against GOOG. Do not ever act based on analyst opinions you see on finance.yahoo; recommendations on CNN, CNBC. Take these opinions with a scoop of salt.
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Rule #2: The periodic earnings report mean next to nothing. You think I'm joking? Ask any real accountant. Periodic financial statements are not audited, nor do they reflect an entire operating cycle. Expenses might be deferred to later on. The real story is to be seen when a year or two has passed. After such a period, you will have seen two audited reports and the period is sufficiently long that revenues and expenses can't be shuffled to look favourable. In other words, if something bad is happening it can't be hidden forever.
Those are my recommendations, as an accounting student and someone who has done decently with market investments.