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I'm a shareholder in Google so you won't be surprised to hear that I'm more optimistic about Google's future prospects. As an aside, here's what Fortune magazi

by MarkMc 9y ago

I'm a shareholder in Google so you won't be surprised to hear that I'm more optimistic about Google's future prospects. As an aside, here's what Fortune magazine said about the Coca Cola Company in 1938: “Several times every year a weighty and serious investor looks long and with profound respect at Coca-Cola’s record, but comes regretfully to the conclusion that he is looking too late. The specters of saturation and competition rise before him.” From http://www.mdaniels.com/coca-cola-on-market-saturation-and-competition/ http://www.mdaniels.com/coca-cola-on-market-saturation-and-c...

tyingq 9y ago
You're right in that I may be missing something, but my reasoning was this: - Revenue continues to be mostly ad driven - They have been able to maintain growth that exceeds internet growth by having big levers...like showing more ads above the fold than they used to. - I don't see any more big levers, just smaller ones, and "not free" ones. You can see their traffic acquisition cost is up.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  The part you're missing is that the Internet is still growing, and so having inserted themselves as the gateway to the Internet, they can maintain large growth rates simply riding along Internet growth without increasing their share of it. The Internet may have tapped out in terms of number of people online (although even this I doubt; last I heard it was something like 3B Internet users, out of 7B total humans), but it still has a long way to go in terms of usage. Think of all the senior citizens who still watch the evening news, read the newspaper, go shopping in a physical store, decide where to eat by walking around, call up contractors by looking in the yellow pages, and decide which financial products to use based on which sales rep cold-calls them. My mom still does all of the above. As a Millenial, all of those activities have moved online for me. I used to work for Google Search, and my position allowed me to have access to their query metrics. We'd listen to the earnings calls and laugh at the Wall Street analysts whose questions indicated that they assumed that # of queries was static, something we knew wasn't true.
  - tryingagainbro 9y ago
    So you're saying that John Q will search 30% more next year and Google will own (with FB) say 85% of the ad market. How long will that last before enemies succeed to get the state involved? Goog is valued at $700 BILLION right now. Will it be $1.5 Trillion in 5-10 years?
    - nostrademons 9y ago
      Or rather, John Q Millenial is already using Google for most things and will search 5% more, but his dad John Q Boomer will finally be convinced to save $50/month by cutting his TV subscription and using the Internet only and will search 45% more. Or if that doesn't happen, John Q Boomer dies off and his place, as a consumer, is taken by John Q Student who already uses Google for 100% of his consumption. That's what happens when you get a technological revolution - the new means of production completely replaces the old. Imagine you were born into a wealthy Virginia plantation in 1830. Your mental model of the world is that cotton is king, wealth comes from working and owning the land, slavery is just how things are done, traveling beyond your plantation is prohibitive in time and cost, and your family is part of the landed aristocracy and secure in its social position. If you live to the ripe old age of 90 and die in 1920, you will have seen cotton become just another commodity, inconceivable wealth generated by newfangled machines that you could not have imagined, over half the population move to tenements in cities, people crossing the Atlantic in a matter of days, slavery outlawed, and your plantation burned and its title stripped from you and divided amongst your slaves. And yeah, if the state survives, it will absolutely get involved. I would bet even money that the concept of a nation state fractures and starts to disintegrate within 20 years, though. The idea of a nation-state as it currently exists is a construct of the Industrial Revolution: the new technologies being developed benefitted from vastly increased scale and social organization, and so those populations that organized themselves as nations were able to defeat those that did not in battle. (Note that in the example above, the "state" was Virginia in 1830 but the United States in 1920; the U.S. of 1830 was organized as a loose confederation of states while that of 1920 was organized as a nation-state with a strong central government, and it took the "Union" defeating the "Confederacy" to bring that about.) I don't know what sort of social organization the information age will demand, whether it'll be city-states in a trade confederation or corporate feudalism where you pledge loyalty for your employer in exchange for protection, but it'll likely not be the nation state as we currently know it.
tryingagainbro 9y ago
How much $$ do they still make from "Coca Cola" ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Coca-Cola_brands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Coca-Cola_brands What is Google gonna buy, especially now that EU antitrust is on their tail?

by MarkMc 9y ago

tyingq 9y ago

You're right in that I may be missing something, but my reasoning was this: - Revenue continues to be mostly ad driven - They have been able to maintain growth that exceeds internet growth by having big levers...like showing more ads above the fold than they used to. - I don't see any more big levers, just smaller ones, and "not free" ones. You can see their traffic acquisition cost is up.

nostrademons 9y ago
The part you're missing is that the Internet is still growing, and so having inserted themselves as the gateway to the Internet, they can maintain large growth rates simply riding along Internet growth without increasing their share of it. The Internet may have tapped out in terms of number of people online (although even this I doubt; last I heard it was something like 3B Internet users, out of 7B total humans), but it still has a long way to go in terms of usage. Think of all the senior citizens who still watch the evening news, read the newspaper, go shopping in a physical store, decide where to eat by walking around, call up contractors by looking in the yellow pages, and decide which financial products to use based on which sales rep cold-calls them. My mom still does all of the above. As a Millenial, all of those activities have moved online for me. I used to work for Google Search, and my position allowed me to have access to their query metrics. We'd listen to the earnings calls and laugh at the Wall Street analysts whose questions indicated that they assumed that # of queries was static, something we knew wasn't true.
- tryingagainbro 9y ago
  So you're saying that John Q will search 30% more next year and Google will own (with FB) say 85% of the ad market. How long will that last before enemies succeed to get the state involved? Goog is valued at $700 BILLION right now. Will it be $1.5 Trillion in 5-10 years?
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    Or rather, John Q Millenial is already using Google for most things and will search 5% more, but his dad John Q Boomer will finally be convinced to save $50/month by cutting his TV subscription and using the Internet only and will search 45% more. Or if that doesn't happen, John Q Boomer dies off and his place, as a consumer, is taken by John Q Student who already uses Google for 100% of his consumption. That's what happens when you get a technological revolution - the new means of production completely replaces the old. Imagine you were born into a wealthy Virginia plantation in 1830. Your mental model of the world is that cotton is king, wealth comes from working and owning the land, slavery is just how things are done, traveling beyond your plantation is prohibitive in time and cost, and your family is part of the landed aristocracy and secure in its social position. If you live to the ripe old age of 90 and die in 1920, you will have seen cotton become just another commodity, inconceivable wealth generated by newfangled machines that you could not have imagined, over half the population move to tenements in cities, people crossing the Atlantic in a matter of days, slavery outlawed, and your plantation burned and its title stripped from you and divided amongst your slaves. And yeah, if the state survives, it will absolutely get involved. I would bet even money that the concept of a nation state fractures and starts to disintegrate within 20 years, though. The idea of a nation-state as it currently exists is a construct of the Industrial Revolution: the new technologies being developed benefitted from vastly increased scale and social organization, and so those populations that organized themselves as nations were able to defeat those that did not in battle. (Note that in the example above, the "state" was Virginia in 1830 but the United States in 1920; the U.S. of 1830 was organized as a loose confederation of states while that of 1920 was organized as a nation-state with a strong central government, and it took the "Union" defeating the "Confederacy" to bring that about.) I don't know what sort of social organization the information age will demand, whether it'll be city-states in a trade confederation or corporate feudalism where you pledge loyalty for your employer in exchange for protection, but it'll likely not be the nation state as we currently know it.

tryingagainbro 9y ago

How much $$ do they still make from "Coca Cola" ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Coca-Cola_brands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Coca-Cola_brands What is Google gonna buy, especially now that EU antitrust is on their tail?