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| 5/24 |
| 2007/10/3-5 [Computer/Companies/Google] UID:48235 Activity:insanely high |
10/3 Alright you idiots. I challenge you to list other Google products
that actually make money besides search and ads. Gmail? No. Maps?
No. Earth? No. WHAT ELSE?
\_ Something near 99% of google's revenue comes from search+ads. There
is nothing else. They've been throwing money at random stuff since
they IPO'd but still have nothing. Maybe they can buy Skype....
\_ Their best bet is to take their name and some of their cash
and do just that: start merging with "real" companies. Cisco
used that strategy to much success. In that case, though,
you are betting on GOOG's management team. Not sure how good
they are but I worry when the BoD still has the founders on it.
\_ Did you seriously just call Google a fake company? Are you
stupid or just delusional? -dans
\_ Please show me where I called GOOG a "fake company". Also,
there's a reason "real" is in quotes.
\_ Actually, as of six months ago this was incorrect. The split
was closer to 90/10. I'll leave it as an exercise for you to go
read the prospectus to see what the other 10 is. -dans
\_ So if they lost their search income, they'd *only* take a
90% loss in revenue? Whatever. At that rate, another 40
years and they'll be able to afford to lose the search market.
\_ Your numbers are junk. They make the majority of their
money by delivering ads to other web sites (AdSense).
They have a corner on the huge and growing market for
Internet ad delivery. That is why they are worth bundles,
not the search part.
\_ Ok so they make 90% of their money putting ads on other
sites. Just like a few dozen other companies doing
the same thing. Google has a corner on that why?
Because they have more hype. Ever talked to anyone
who actually tried to attract customers via adsense ads?
What special magic do you believe google's adsense has
that their dozens of competitors don't (besides hype)?
\_ Well, they can technically make money from things like GMail
and Maps (e.g. by charging for them) but the barriers to entry are
low and I would hardly value them 13th in the USA based on those
sorts of products.
\_ By removing Ads you are removing the revenue that Gmail and many
of Googles other products use to be profitable. The fact that
Google can target their ads by using the content of your email
is quite significant.
\_ Why are you calling us idiots? -dans
\_ Because you guys haven't learned from the dot-BOMB days.
\_ 'You guys?'. Both sides of this argument haven't learned the
lesson, which comes in two parts:
a) Don't miss out on opportunities.
b) Don't be overly greedy.
You need to learn part a. And if you are short google at
100 guy, then, seriously, you're an idiot. Perception
counts in the market, sometimes moreso than objective
reality. -dans
\_ "Besides ads." That is how all media companies make money.
What is The New York Times source of money other than ads?
\_ NYT is losing money so this isn't a good example of how
to build a great and growing company.
\_ hint: the world has been around longer than 5 years.
\_ No it is not. Learn how to read a 10-K.
How about News Corp? CBS? CNN? Are they all fake companies, too?
What percentage of Google's revenue comes from AdSense? That has
nothing to do with search.
\_ Are you saying the NYTimes has no subscribers?
\_ Subscription revenue is dwarfed by ad revenue (though
not as dwarfed as I thought, when I actually bothered
to look up the numbers).
\_ What are these other media companies valued at relative to
GOOG? What competition have they faced? Why should GOOG be
valued more than any of them?
\_ What is the market share of Google compared to CNN?
\_ I have no idea, but I imagine it's some piece of the
same pie all of those companies are sharing. Do you?
\_ you think that the amount of money spent on advertising
is a constant? -tom
\_ I know it isn't. It rises and falls with the
health of the economy. What about it?
\_ You don't think it's possible that the creation
of a new advertising medium could increase the
total amount being spent on advertising?
\_ GOOG is valued much, much higher, as a percentage of
revenue and profit, but it is growing much faster and
is dominant in the fastest growing area of the economy.
-Guy who used to own GOOG, but sold it so that wife
could do a kitchen remodel.
\_ It can't grow to be any larger than existing media and
I didn't realize "advertising" was the fastest growing
area of the economy.
\_ This is where someone has to "quote Gartner" and make
up something about how $business will be an $X billion
industry by $now_year+6.
\_ Internet advertising is. Overall media advertising
spending is $200B+/yr, so yeah that is probably an
upper limit for GOOG total revenue, in that one
product. That doesn't count possible revenue from
other sources. I don't really have time to educate
you on how businesses on the Internet make money,
can't you research some of this yourself? Here,
I will throw you a bone:
http://www.csua.org/u/jnm (Business Week)
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_15/b4029001.htm |
| 5/24 |
|
| www.csua.org/u/jnm -> www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_15/b4029001.htm VIEW POLL RESULTS This is the future according to EPIC 2014, a faux documentary posted to the Web in late 2004 by young journalists Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan. Thanks to their slightly tongue-in-cheek, Twilight Zone-inspired tone, the short video drew as many chuckles as gasps of dismay from the legions of mainstream media types and Web digerati who viewed it. As the place nearly 400 million people each month start on the Internet, it's the No. Consumers love Google's simplicity and results, which is why it draws 56% of all searches. To the consternation of many of those companies and more, Google is now using that market cap, along with its $11 billion hoard of cash and investments, to storm a wide range of traditional markets. It's selling ads in newspapers, magazines, radio, and, in a trial program, television. It's spooking the telecom industry with fledgling efforts to provide free wireless Internet access. Google's phenomenal ad machine, in short, has the potential to vaporize the profits of any industry that traffics in bits and bytes and to shift the economics to the advantage of Google, its users, and its cadre of partners. Now, after years of hand-wringing and thumb-twiddling, some of them are pulling out the heavy artillery and firing one round after another on the Googleplex, the company's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. The latest salvo: On Mar 22, NBC Universal and News Corp. NWS ) announced big plans for a rival to Google's enormously popular YouTube video site that will run not only television show clips but even full-length movies on Yahoo! JUST THE WEEK BEFORE, Viacom sued Google for a headline-grabbing $1 billion, charging YouTube with willfully infringing on copyrights by allowing users to upload clips of The Colbert Report, South Park, and other TV shows. A couple of weeks earlier, Copiepress, a group representing Belgian and German newspapers, won a copyright case that could sharply limit Google's usefulness if it sets a precedent. And get this: In the Valley and Washington, DC, there's even cocktail party chatter about whether the search giant's power needs to be reined in by antitrust regulators. It's unlikely to happen but is an indication of rivals' growing trepidation about Google. To an extent that none of the first generation of dot-coms did, Google has come to represent all our hopes, dreams, and fears about the disruptive promise and dangers of the Internet. As this clash plays out over the next couple of years, the outcome could determine the way we'll entertain ourselves, shop, socialize, and do business on the Internet. The overriding question: Will the vast commercial landscape of the Net, like so many other tech markets in the past, condense to one dominant force for the foreseeable future? All this might sound crazy given that we're talking about a nine-year-old company that wasn't even publicly traded until Aug. Let's face it, there's a certain hysteria about Google, a presumption of unlimited power. A year ago, Google was rumored to be going into the personal computer manufacturing business, and last week stories about a Google cell phone ran rampant. "We're not competing with newspapers, we're not competing with television stations, and we're not competing with the Viacoms of the world," insists Google Chief Executive Eric E Schmidt. What's more, some of Google's initiatives, such as those in print and radio ads, have not taken the world by storm. Yet to justify that market cap, Google must expand into more densely occupied markets for continued growth when online advertising matures. "Otherwise, the growth is going down to 30%" in the next few years. The question now: Does the pushback against Google mark that turning point when a successful company's power starts to work against it? "Ecosystems always organize to curtail entities that get too powerful," notes Geoffrey A Moore, author of The Gorilla Game: Picking Winners in High Technology and a managing director at corporate strategist TCG Advisors. As a result, Google may need to change some of its more aggressive tactics to ease the fear it engenders. But for now those alternatives, whether they be a struggling Yahoo or Microsoft or the new NBC-News Corp. video network, by all accounts pale next to the Google juggernaut. More than anyone else, Google is defining the new architecture of media and commerce in the digital world. The unruly expanse of the Internet and its opportunities cries out for a map, and that's what Google is building out of tens of thousands of server computers around the world that handle quadrillions of bytes of data. With each new search whose data refine that map, with each new business that links its own digital explorations to the search engine, Google gains more knowledge and more power. As a result, it's in a position not only to define what this new world looks like but also to chart where it goes and even determine which will be the prime destinations and which will become backwaters. This awesome data-gathering capability seriously worries some thinkers. Tech historian George Dyson, author of Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence, thinks Google actually might pose a national defense concern at some point simply by virtue of its singularly massive storehouse of data, the crude oil of the Information Economy. "That much money and power concentrated in one place can be dangerous," says Dyson, who sometimes advises the Defense Dept. While he doesn't think Google yet poses such a threat, he raises a more obvious concern: Google's vast network, now a substantial piece of the Internet itself, is "very quickly becoming vital national security infrastructure." If this talk of corporate dominance sounds vaguely familiar, it should. IBM ) ruled mainframe computing and Microsoft the personal computer age, so Google has the potential to rule the Internet. To some people, Google's position today, while clearly far from identical to Microsoft's in its heyday, nonetheless shares some striking parallels. "Google feels a lot like Microsoft in the mid-Nineties," says Silicon Valley startup adviser Dave McClure. "Right at the height of its power, getting a little arrogant, and challenged for the first time by some powerful people." Even mighty Microsoft has been criticizing Google's power and ambitions. CEO Steve Ballmer last fall accused Google of suppressing competition in online ads. As rich as the irony of his accusation is, given Microsoft's own antitrust battles, the charge isn't unique. Google's mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," so charmingly visionary in a startup, now sounds to some people downright predatory in a company of nearly 12,000 employees. Google even worries partners such as Time Warner, whose AOL unit in late 2005 took $1 billion from Google for a 5% stake and the right to run ads on the service. "Obviously, Google has a great deal of power, and it needs to be very careful not to leverage that power to stifle competition," says Paul T Cappuccio, executive vice-president and general counsel at Time Warner Inc. Naturally, none of this criticism sits well with Google executives. The company, they note, has a commanding position solely because users and customers like Google's services, not because they're forced to use them. "To say Google is too powerful implies that users are somehow making a wrong choice," says Schmidt, who calls the comparison to Microsoft "absolutely false." Few people, even Valley leaders who have faced the dominance of Microsoft firsthand, suggest that Google needs to be checked by government regulators. "Does ad-subsidized software threaten legacy businesses? CRM ): "Google has really stepped up and defined what the future of our industry can be." MOREOVER, THERE'S LITTLE EVIDENCE that users have any problem with the company's power, even if they don't all take its informal motto, "Don't be evil," at face value. These fans might be excused for tossing back their own question to the whiners: Too powerful at what? Helping me find things, get work done, connect with friends? For most of us, then, c... |
| www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_15/b4029001.htm VIEW POLL RESULTS This is the future according to EPIC 2014, a faux documentary posted to the Web in late 2004 by young journalists Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan. Thanks to their slightly tongue-in-cheek, Twilight Zone-inspired tone, the short video drew as many chuckles as gasps of dismay from the legions of mainstream media types and Web digerati who viewed it. As the place nearly 400 million people each month start on the Internet, it's the No. Consumers love Google's simplicity and results, which is why it draws 56% of all searches. To the consternation of many of those companies and more, Google is now using that market cap, along with its $11 billion hoard of cash and investments, to storm a wide range of traditional markets. It's selling ads in newspapers, magazines, radio, and, in a trial program, television. It's spooking the telecom industry with fledgling efforts to provide free wireless Internet access. Google's phenomenal ad machine, in short, has the potential to vaporize the profits of any industry that traffics in bits and bytes and to shift the economics to the advantage of Google, its users, and its cadre of partners. Now, after years of hand-wringing and thumb-twiddling, some of them are pulling out the heavy artillery and firing one round after another on the Googleplex, the company's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. The latest salvo: On Mar 22, NBC Universal and News Corp. NWS ) announced big plans for a rival to Google's enormously popular YouTube video site that will run not only television show clips but even full-length movies on Yahoo! JUST THE WEEK BEFORE, Viacom sued Google for a headline-grabbing $1 billion, charging YouTube with willfully infringing on copyrights by allowing users to upload clips of The Colbert Report, South Park, and other TV shows. A couple of weeks earlier, Copiepress, a group representing Belgian and German newspapers, won a copyright case that could sharply limit Google's usefulness if it sets a precedent. And get this: In the Valley and Washington, DC, there's even cocktail party chatter about whether the search giant's power needs to be reined in by antitrust regulators. It's unlikely to happen but is an indication of rivals' growing trepidation about Google. To an extent that none of the first generation of dot-coms did, Google has come to represent all our hopes, dreams, and fears about the disruptive promise and dangers of the Internet. As this clash plays out over the next couple of years, the outcome could determine the way we'll entertain ourselves, shop, socialize, and do business on the Internet. The overriding question: Will the vast commercial landscape of the Net, like so many other tech markets in the past, condense to one dominant force for the foreseeable future? All this might sound crazy given that we're talking about a nine-year-old company that wasn't even publicly traded until Aug. Let's face it, there's a certain hysteria about Google, a presumption of unlimited power. A year ago, Google was rumored to be going into the personal computer manufacturing business, and last week stories about a Google cell phone ran rampant. "We're not competing with newspapers, we're not competing with television stations, and we're not competing with the Viacoms of the world," insists Google Chief Executive Eric E Schmidt. What's more, some of Google's initiatives, such as those in print and radio ads, have not taken the world by storm. Yet to justify that market cap, Google must expand into more densely occupied markets for continued growth when online advertising matures. "Otherwise, the growth is going down to 30%" in the next few years. The question now: Does the pushback against Google mark that turning point when a successful company's power starts to work against it? "Ecosystems always organize to curtail entities that get too powerful," notes Geoffrey A Moore, author of The Gorilla Game: Picking Winners in High Technology and a managing director at corporate strategist TCG Advisors. As a result, Google may need to change some of its more aggressive tactics to ease the fear it engenders. But for now those alternatives, whether they be a struggling Yahoo or Microsoft or the new NBC-News Corp. video network, by all accounts pale next to the Google juggernaut. More than anyone else, Google is defining the new architecture of media and commerce in the digital world. The unruly expanse of the Internet and its opportunities cries out for a map, and that's what Google is building out of tens of thousands of server computers around the world that handle quadrillions of bytes of data. With each new search whose data refine that map, with each new business that links its own digital explorations to the search engine, Google gains more knowledge and more power. As a result, it's in a position not only to define what this new world looks like but also to chart where it goes and even determine which will be the prime destinations and which will become backwaters. This awesome data-gathering capability seriously worries some thinkers. Tech historian George Dyson, author of Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence, thinks Google actually might pose a national defense concern at some point simply by virtue of its singularly massive storehouse of data, the crude oil of the Information Economy. "That much money and power concentrated in one place can be dangerous," says Dyson, who sometimes advises the Defense Dept. While he doesn't think Google yet poses such a threat, he raises a more obvious concern: Google's vast network, now a substantial piece of the Internet itself, is "very quickly becoming vital national security infrastructure." If this talk of corporate dominance sounds vaguely familiar, it should. IBM ) ruled mainframe computing and Microsoft the personal computer age, so Google has the potential to rule the Internet. To some people, Google's position today, while clearly far from identical to Microsoft's in its heyday, nonetheless shares some striking parallels. "Google feels a lot like Microsoft in the mid-Nineties," says Silicon Valley startup adviser Dave McClure. "Right at the height of its power, getting a little arrogant, and challenged for the first time by some powerful people." Even mighty Microsoft has been criticizing Google's power and ambitions. CEO Steve Ballmer last fall accused Google of suppressing competition in online ads. As rich as the irony of his accusation is, given Microsoft's own antitrust battles, the charge isn't unique. Google's mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," so charmingly visionary in a startup, now sounds to some people downright predatory in a company of nearly 12,000 employees. Google even worries partners such as Time Warner, whose AOL unit in late 2005 took $1 billion from Google for a 5% stake and the right to run ads on the service. "Obviously, Google has a great deal of power, and it needs to be very careful not to leverage that power to stifle competition," says Paul T Cappuccio, executive vice-president and general counsel at Time Warner Inc. Naturally, none of this criticism sits well with Google executives. The company, they note, has a commanding position solely because users and customers like Google's services, not because they're forced to use them. "To say Google is too powerful implies that users are somehow making a wrong choice," says Schmidt, who calls the comparison to Microsoft "absolutely false." Few people, even Valley leaders who have faced the dominance of Microsoft firsthand, suggest that Google needs to be checked by government regulators. "Does ad-subsidized software threaten legacy businesses? CRM ): "Google has really stepped up and defined what the future of our industry can be." MOREOVER, THERE'S LITTLE EVIDENCE that users have any problem with the company's power, even if they don't all take its informal motto, "Don't be evil," at face value. These fans might be excused for tossing back their own question to the whiners: Too powerful at what? Helping me find things, get work done, connect with friends? For most of us, then, c... |