Slashdot Mirror
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."
I'm not an investor or broker so perhaps someone can explain this to me while I furrow my brow in a vain attempt to understand the situation.
From TFA:
It was the second time in a week that Google shares - the hottest, most talked about company stock in the world - were plunged unexpectedly into a frigid bath.
Ok, shares plunged. Got it. Now, let's go look at the big board for the last five days. Ok, I see the plunges, $430 to $390. Ouch--12%.
But with today's trading, as of 11 AM Central Standard Time, shares are hovering around $405. How frigid is that "bath" if it only takes five days to get back up to $430? Clearly it's already rising back up to its once held position.
Perhaps it's time I make 12% on that extra $1,000 rainy day money I've got lying around. What does slashdot think? Google stock for the (almost certain) cash or Rickenbacker bass to make my going-nowhere-band slightly better?
My work here is dung.
The sad part of this is it's because investors weren't happy with profits being up "only" 82%. They had expected more. So they sold.
Is the stock market full of asshats or what?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
If you're playing the stock for the long haul, you're just chuckling to yourself. Its up how many fold in the past 12 months?
This reminds me of the spending spree done by tech companies during the stock price boom of the late 90's. Google has now found themselves with a shit load of cash, and they figure they better do something with it before people realise how overvalued the stock is. Link
I'd say call me Nostradamus, but this should have been obvious to everyone.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Google's riduculously high stock price amounts to a gamble on the part of its investors. I wonder how many investors knew this was coming and were smart enough to short this stock.
In fact, the censorship stuff would make people more intrested in investing. The problem is that they missed earnings estimates (not their own estimates, but other peoples). Some people say because of a diffrent tax scheme or whatever, but I doubt that.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This is the price of doing the right thing (most of the time).
Google may indeed have a hard time ahead of it, especially legally. It's legal bills are certainly going to be a large amount of their budget. Personally, Google scares me - they're a giant, and they succeed at almost everything they do, and what's almost worse - they usually have good products. This sounds good, but it just means they're entering more and more arena's, as the article says, and what happens when one day they control everything?
At the end of the day, even if Google stops expanding right now - cuts out Google Earth, Google News, etc it would still have a massively profitable advertising business. So even if its growth slows, even if its stock plumets (face it, it is unreasonably high), it isn't going anywhere. As Google itself said - there's no reason to worry about the stock dip.
-Daniel
The stock price took a hit yesterday because Google didn't meet analysts' *quarterly* expectations. BFD. Anyone that's not in the stock market for the long run, please do us all a favor and leave. The following exerpt from an AP article this morning sums everything up:
"Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have vowed not to forecast the company's earnings because they worry about becoming caught in a trap that will require them to focus on short-term profits at the expense of what's best for the long haul.
The no-guidance policy has forced analysts to make educated guesses that previously vastly underestimated Google's rapid growth. And that helped fuel perceptions that the company could do no wrong."
Meanwhile, anyone that bought in at the IPO or any number of months ago is sitting pretty.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I'm not asking that in a wide-eyed naive way, but rather in a realpolitik way: Can a company make compromises with the "keepers of the keys" without losing its core values?
The deal with the PRC to censor certain anti-China items comes to mind. According to Google, the situation is "better with them there than not." At what point does a rationale become a self-serving rationalization?
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
And why do 'tulips' spring to mind over this news...?
If that growth rate slows to that or a more "normal" company then yes the price will tumble as the numbers will dictate that it is not wise to bet on growth to continue at that pace in the future. This is not Wall Street being stupid and not valuing Google as much as it is Wall Street realizing that maybe they were too optimistic that Google represented the second coming of the dot com boom. If Google continues to behave more like a regular business in relation to growth rate and earnings expect it's stock price to come back down out of the stratosphere over the next year or two.
Also, Google is starting to get into the "throw a lot of things at the wall and see what sticks" model of new projects. Probably because they have oodles of cash sitting around and they need to do something with it. Unless those start bringing in profits traditional investors will start losing faith in the company, and that spells lower stock prices.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
I would have thought that a journalist would understand the difference between plagiarism and copyright infringement. They are two separate things. Plagiarism is when you take credit for others' work. Copyright infringement is when you copy something that you aren't legally permitted to. You can commit copyright infringement without plagiarising (e.g. the majority of music sharing) and you can plagiarise without committing copyright infringement (e.g. taking credit for something that is public domain).
As far as I am aware, Google are not being accused of plagiarism by anybody but this journalist. They are being accused of copying news headlines illegally, but that's clearly not plagiarism, as the headlines link to the original story.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Nearly all of the stock charts out there neglect the time span between market closing and opening the next day. They usually just take the difference and indicate this as an overnight jump.
The real story is that the stock plummeted about 16-18% in about the 20 minutes after market close. Overnight, that number readjusted to about 4%. Therefore, all the charts out there will neglect the momentary 16-18% drop, and just show the 4% drop. I've personally taken a small hit from the recent GOOG shakiness, but realize that it's only the short-term investors that are causing this. I bought (a small amount of) GOOG stock not for a quick buck, but for long-term appreciation. I sincerely think Google is doing good things that will make money for its investors (eg: me).
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
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.
You can't handle the truth.
First, it's great that this is in process of development -- I hope it catches on and it is included in Firefox standard install!
:(. I tried a quick couple of searches and got no results back whereas google found stuff... (for example, my name).
On the otherhand, it still has a ways to go to match google
Google lost $13B US, not $23.1B US
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....
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
Google is simply the most prominent of many companies riding the wave of history. They appeared with good tools at a time when people were just starting to really depend on such tools. They still have a lot of work to do, but the basics (their search engine and business model) are good enough to keep them on the wave.
The U.S. is in a transition, for better or worse, from the manufacturing economy we've had since 1900 or so to an information economy. I put the date at 1900 since that was about the time the country was mostly settled and people started to buy cars and appliances. The connectedness of everything, in which the primary means of communication is the Internet, spells fabulous riches for those who can take advantage of it.
The culture and legal micro-management of companies which encourages them to extract the highest short-term profit, at the expense of the long-term health of the company, is destroying our manufacturing base. Everything except weapons will soon be built overseas, since weapons have to be built in a Congressman's home district or they don't get his vote. Most such are built in as many different districts as possible, at the expense of efficiency and quality.
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and others will be the new GEs and GMs. The hardware companies will continue to make money, but with lower and lower margins, as more and more capability to access the network gets built into different appliances. Wal-Mart will suck up all the retail business, buying up all the corner grocery stores.
Wrap all of this together and you see that it's pointless to fight the information wave. Google isn't inventing new, illegal uses for other people's information; they're applying old principles to the new connectedness. Others will copy their model, to varying success. The folks in suits had better get in the boat, or be washed away.
sigs, as if you care.
Upon hearing of Google's demise, Steve Ballmer celebrates by gleefully throwing his chair through his window and doing the monkeyboy dance while yelling " I warned Google...MuhHaHaHa!"
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Don't use /. for stock tips
It's worse than using a retarded monkey throwing darts to pick your stocks.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I see little evidence that (in general) individual investors are emotional and institutional investors are rational. Quite often it's the opposite. This is particularly true when markets turn sour, and the insititional investors are yelling "sell, sell, sell" just when stocks are cheaper.
Individual investors have the luxury of being their own boss. They can hold on to any stock they want for as long they want. In the past I've bought stocks in steel and forestry that I knew were in a depressed industries. I knew I might have to wait 5 years of more before they turned around. I also knew that when they did they would double or more (thank you, IPSCO).
Institutional investors, on the other hand, are constantly having their decisions questioned. They know that even one bad year can mean the end of their job. Thus they can not afford to be too patient or too rational. They have to ride the trend.
Give us a whirl.. feedback is always appreciated.
If I type "kfg" into Google my Slashdot user info page is the number two hit.
If I type "kfg" into Mozdex it doesn't even show up.
You suck.
KFG
1) The estimates aren't based solely upon the analysts' views. Frequently, the final estimate is based on a negotiation between the company and the analyst. It's not quite as explicit as that, but there are a lot of ways that the company can adjust the estimate (warnings probably being the most overt).
2) It's not necessarily clear that Sergey can sell those shares. Most of the time in an IPO, the founders (etc.) get N shares, but they can't legally sell them for a period of time after the IPO. That helps keep the founders (etc.) in line while the company gets used to being publicly traded. As such, his net worth on the N shares he has is N*(price of google stock), but it's illiquid.
Less formally, should that not be the case, and he dumps all his shares, what do you think happens to the company? A founder of the company has basically said that he has absolutely no faith in the ability of the company to make money moving forward. If that happens, a 12% dip is going to seem like a nice day.
The people who generally make real money in on IPO are the investment bankers and venture capitalists, not the founders.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
No, we've completed a transition from a productive, creditor nation to a consumer, debtor nation in about 30 years. Someone produced all those neat toys that make your "information economy" possible. Odds are, it wasn't an American. Ideas and "intellectual property" are not tangible goods being produced by this nation. They take nearly no effort to copy. No amount of DRM or IP laws are going to change that. As an extreme case, India is not going to sit by quietly and watch its population of PEOPLE die from AIDS because they cannot afford our patented AIDS drugs. They will simply break our laws, and infringe on our self declared, concocted monopoly to produce those drugs. "Intellectual property" only exists to provide incentive to people "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." When your family, friends, neighbors and countrymen are being decimated by disease, you need no other incentive. The drugs will continue to be researched and made by people with a personal investment in them. To a lesser extent, the same applies to books, movies, songs, and all other art, culture, and information "protected" by our "intellectual property" laws. We will soon wake up to the fact that it is a total sham, impoverished and struggling to survive. Outsourcing, piracy, draconian IP laws, and our weakening currency are only the symptoms of this eventual outcome. The American behemoth is being outmaneuvered and outsmarted by more nimble nations with real production capacity, real goods to sell, and few if any "intellectual property" laws to stifle the innovation of those goods.