Google Share Loss Amounts to Billions

aCoward writes "Today's full page headline on the UK Independent: £13,000,000,000 in Googlised colours, with the subheading Google shares plummet in one day amid growing fury over censorship and plagiarism. While the company says it isn't worried about the stock price correction, there are other issues at hand." From the article: "Google is under mounting pressure from many traditional industries: telecommunications companies do not like its plan for free internet phone calls, book publishers and newspapers have filed a lawsuit to try to prevent it from digitising library materials, governments are worried about its satellite-imaging service Google Earth and privacy advocates have a growing list of concerns about everything from its e-mail service to its desktop search function, both of which may make it easier for hackers or government agencies to gather information about individuals without their consent."

Comments

$13,000,000,000 - that's a big number

[roman_mir]

I still don't understand how can Google be valued at over 100 billion USD. An advertising company that also built some pretty good software? The lion share of their profits comes from ads, but I never click on those ads. I guess there must be someone out there who does click on them.

Maybe Google shouldn't have based its operations in the States? All of these companies are now thinking about suing Google for threatening their older business models. No surprise there. But we now see how NTP patents are being thrown out of the patent office, the same can happen to other firms. Google has plenty of leverage now, even government officials maybe using it once in a while. On the other hand Google has probably pissed off some people in the government, who wanted to get access to their search logs.

In any case, all of this stock price movement is based on speculations. It was based on speculations that Google will do well in the beginning, and it is based on speculations that Google may get hurt by other firms and even the government.

As the user of Google search page but not a shareholder of Google stock, I only need to know how these speculations will affect the quality of the free services I am getting from Google. Everything else can burn in hell.

Consider this...

[FalconZero]

As Microsoft became bigger (read : multisector monopoly), consumers liked Microsoft less, and companies liked Microsoft more.
As Google becomes bigger (read : multisector monopoly), consumers liked Google more, and companies Google them less.

The difference?
Microsoft's user products generate their own sector where third parties can create products for the Windows platform. Google's products do not. Google's user products are (currently) free, if you don't count the ads. Microsoft's are not.

My conclusion:
Microsoft provides most benefit to companies, Google provides most benefit to consumers. Microsoft relies (mostly) on consumers for its revenue. Google relies mostly on companies for its revenue. Both are currently antagonising their customers, but an individual Google customer is more important than and individual Microsoft customer.

This is all just my observation and opinion, so I'd be interested to see what others think about it....

Re:And the sad part

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

Google (unlike almost all other tech companies) don't give thier own quarterly projections, so incomplete information or not, the analysts projections were the only projections out there (unless individual some investors did thier own), and thus were relied upon when coming to a valuation. Stock prices aren't set based on last quarters performance, but on next quarters perforance. If the final numbers come in under best available projects (based on full information or not), you will see a correction.

Now this doesn't mean the company is in trouble or that is outlook isn't even perhaps better today than it was a quarter ago. It is simply a market based reality. If your performance is under the best projection that people used to value the stock, the stock will correct to account for that unless another outside force counters that.