This seems like a bit of a non-story in some ways. Their revenue was up slightly YOY, and after that crazy huge quarter and the economic slow down this seems like a non-deal.
Costs grew due to a hiring binge (that can be easily stopped, or even reversed - it’s entirely in Google’s hands) and to increased costs for their data centers (hardware, electricity) which are cyclical.
There’s no indication so far of any fundamental long-term changes to the cost structure.
It's hilarious how often nearly this exact quote appears at the top comment in any bad news that shows up on the front page.
Sure this isn't the end of the world but clearly the market doesn't believe this is a "non-deal".
We're also absolutely seeing a broader shift in the tech space, and traditionally companies like Google have been more immune to market changes than others.
But of course the current mantra of HN is "this is fine", it's part of a broader trend of denialism in the community that major shifts, towards things being worse, in many parts of our lives are happening.
I don't understand, it was down 7% today, that is no big deal in the grand scheme of things. Over the next 5 years do you think this matters at all to Google given their domination in so many areas?
IE, why is this story on the front page of HN and why is it important? What is the narrative you get from this?
> that is no big deal in the grand scheme of things
I'm not sure how you are making this claim. Today is the 2nd largest single daily drop in GOOG in the last 10 years the company (as a precent).
The 1st largest drop was on 3/16/2020
The 3rd was on 3/12/2020
That means we are seeing early pandemic level drops in a price over an earnings call.
Both of those other drops where due to systemic shocks to the market, this drop reflects just GOOG.
So this is arguably the largest single day decline in the share price of GOOG due solely to their own performance, not do to macro trends.
> why is this story on the front page of HN and why is it important?
As already answered this is a historic decline in the price of GOOG.
> What is the narrative you get from this?
The larger story is that we're seeing a down turns in all the companies that where the hallmark of the current tech boom. The term FAANG originated because those stock were seen as incredibly strong, high growth stocks.
The big part of this story is, as I have mentioned, these companies aren't losing value because of an industry trend that is equally effecting all stocks (that's happening as well) but because of their own individual performance.
Pretty much. The level of "a-ha! this confirms all my priors!" logic in these threads is just deafening.
Look everyone: economies are cyclic. We had a boom. Now we're in a downturn. It's happened before, many times. It will happen again. Nothing happening today is remotely as scary as what we saw in 2008, frankly isn't nearly as disruptive as the 2001 crash.
Google will be fine. The tech industry will be fine. Buy the dip, if you're into that sort of thing.
Unemployment numbers at extreme lows as the Baby Boomers retire and millions of Americans are either dead or sick/disabled with Long-COVID19, hampering our economy with a lack of workers?
I don't think today's economy is anything like the frothy housing bubble was in 2007/2008 timeframe.
I think there's a possibility of a tech bubble akin to 2001, but that actually wasn't very disruptive for our economy. I see today more similar to 2001, aside from the weird supply chain issues due to a greatly diminished workforce (the Baby Boomer's retirement is the biggest challenge for this year IMO). (Of course, people have been calling a bubble in tech for decades now, but _eventually_ that damn tech bubble will pop again, lol)
Forum commentators have predicted 100% of every collapse would be no big deal. 2008 wasn't just one thing: it was a cascade failure that progressed over the course of months. Nobody really knew how bad it was until we were down to the wire looking at a complete collapse of the financial system. Every downturn potentially breaks something big that was built on the assumption of infinite growth and had its tendrils into too many parts of the economy.
edit to add: we already see a drying up of ad spends. What happens in an economy built on selling ads, or selling services to people who sell ads when ads sales fail to meet expectations for too long? Everyone forgets data-driven advertising is what saved tech after the crash. Public opinion is rapidly turning against that savior.
We're seeing historic reductions in the consumption of stuff too. A lot of people don't realize that pandemic stimulus checks in the US were being spent like extra pocket money (a lot of people bought durable goods with it), and now that there is no pretense to give out more money, consumer spending is likely to be lower than it would be without those checks.
things will balance out, people will consumer fewer of luxury goods, will consume more of cheaper stuff.
Brands will keep spending to keep their customers, and cheaper alternatives will keep spending on ads to promote their sales.
In competitive market and free economy ads are a fundamental engine that will keep economy running. Ads is sort of toll booth that takes their cut no matter what
Wall St doesn't tend to see a 27% drop in profitability as a non-story. The 6% YoY growth was probably expected, but that's a dramatic rise in expenses.
6% revenue growth is atrocious for Google and also a bad signal for the broader economy because it means companies are drastically cutting back on ad spend
Online advertising as a market is growing faster than Google's revenue. The real story here is that for the past year or so, they have been getting away with milking YouTube users with increasing numbers of ads, and now the consumers are rejecting that.
Growth was like 50% last year. They're just coming back to earth in a post pandemic world. In fact growing revenue at all now that people spend so much less time on their computer seems like a huge win to me, now they just need to control costs.
Main point of concern seems to be that online advertising is still growing 10-20% YoY but Google revenue only grew 10% for search ads and 3.8% for youtube. So their share of ad spending is declining.
Google doesn't seem anti-fragile to me. They have always seemed every bit as vulnerable as Meta, but with a few extra (yet weak) plates of armor due to an unfair ecosystem they've created to funnel you into Adsense. An ecosystem that many legislators and the DOJ think violates antitrust, and that the EU and other countries are already ruling against.
If Apple begins blocking their trackers (see Google's recent worldwide Chrome ad campaigns - a campaign that likely sees the writing on the wall), they lose all Apple revenue.
If 10B market cap companies begin to campaign for antitrust, and Microsoft negotiates for Bing on Apple, Samsung, and Firefox, Google will lose everywhere else.
I honestly don't even see why Microsoft couldn't play equally dirty and revert Chrome's default search engine on Windows to Bing. It's an equally dirty move to the stuff Google has done.
Google could have a strong cloud product, but they're in distant third and aren't investing enough to take away AWS/Azure market share. Their culture of launching products for promo, launching competing products (eg messengers), and then killing them has severely damaged their reputation.
They can surely do that but Google search does provide value. Even my mother noticed poor results when her search changed to some random bing-powered one.
Also, Google has Android ie. largest OS in terms of user-base.
Yeah, I still have DDG as primary on a few devices, and I really need to change it. It doesn't do a fraction of the stuff I need... pretty much worthless to me, though I know I'm not being very fair.
I think bing is better, but google still actually dominates search with a great product, compared to their competitors.
>Building their own platforms was a brilliant idea that made Google resilient against competition owning their Ad delivery platforms.
What platform did they build though?
Android was bought from a third party. YouTube was bought. Chromium was forked from Webkit. Every of Google's in-house projects besides search engine and ad network was a failure.
Gmail worked. As they use it themselves I imagine they must be unable to ignore feedback, sunset it or turn it into the usual steaming pile of horse poop.
Google's insane hiring and investment into a gazillion non-ads product areas over the last 10 years tells you that they know this as well.
They've been shoveling their ad revenues desperately into a furnace of "everything but ads", throwing ideas against numerous walls to see what sticks, and copying other company's product roadmaps. Almost none of it has worked out. They're still dependent on that ad revenue firehose for 90-ish percent of their profits.
When that firehose slows, the only way to maintain things will be to cut costs. So in a way I'm glad I got out of working there before that era began. "Fun" times there have been slowing for years, but it's going to get serious, I think.
Too bad they now have a reputation of killing every new product. Nobody wants to invest time into using their new shiny, because people assume it’ll be gone in a year or two
It's like to counter that Google's business customers and investors see these shut down stories likely in a different light: they stopped doing something that was a distraction from core business or irrelevant. Stadia was a powerful demonstration what Google is capable of, technology-wise.
So investors can count on Google to ax a product that's underperforming, but can't count on them to make competitive products, lasting brands or keeping loyal customers.
But in the long run they need those customers to generate shareholder value. If someone manages to end around them on online advertising Google could be in trouble. Big caveat being so long as they are part of the smartphone duopoly it gives them a pretty healthy moat.
But at the same time, Stadia was a powerful demonstration that if you start playing Zombie Adventureland 7 on a Google product, one day your savefile will be gone.
It does seem a lot of Google's current dominance relies on the idea that Android, YouTube, Google Ads, and Chrome will remain unchallenged. In avenues where they are challenged, they either fold completely (Stadia) or make significantly less than equal counterparts (Play Store v App Store).
Google seems both fragile and sloppy. How they managed to get a bigger/faster slap on the wrist for antitrust in the EU than Apple is a demonstration of this.
Meta / Facebook is also down to $129 from a high of $387. That’s a staggering loss. FB is still in a strong position (to put it mildly), but it’s interesting to see this play out.
Facebook is strategically no different than myspace a decade or two ago. When the cool kids go somewhere else, it becomes clear that the platform itself was nothing special.
Edit: I was downvoted, but I stand by what I wrote. Google has Android and (for now) superior search results. Netflix has content (including their own, not just other people's). Apple has their devices, which are killing it right now. These companies will be okay. It is Facebook that might not exist in 5 years. What do they actually have other than fickle network effects that can be here today and gone tomorrow? VR? That won't save them.
I don't know if this is really true. That shift has occurred to some extent. On the other hand, it seems to me that all the most sociable people I know are still on Facebook.
There definitely are a lot of people that interact with Facebook less, which is obviously huge. I'm not sure these other social media sites will eat up Facebooks core business.
It seems like Facebook could continue to struggle to grow, but these sites seem to fill different roles. I could definitely see Facebook becoming little more than a calendar/messaging system.
Maybe it will collapse eventually, but what we saw with MySpace was pretty extreme, total, and sudden. It happened to Digg too, but wasn't this around the same time as the MySpace stuff was happening? I don't see much reason to think Reddit is going anywhere, either.
I would love to hear more about how Reddit is user hostile, though I have a few thoughts:
- Inconsistent, biased, and downright arrogant moderation.
- Communities drenched in extremism and horrendous discourse. Interacting with a Redditor is like trying to hug a porcupine
- Rampant trolling, even in the best communities.
Also, as a side note was getting sick of all the health and fitness cults. I got fed up getting banned for arguments with someone insulting me because I suggested that consuming massive amounts of fat might have negative health consequences, or that deadlifts are a frequent source of injury, both severe and chronic, or that peanut butter is actually one of the purest foods you can buy (seriously, read the label, it's almost entirely peanuts and salt)...
It got so frustrating. I understand that there's counter arguments to this stuff, but these are very mainstream and rational beliefs, including with people that know what they're talking about. It seemed like the safer advise was being shouted down.
Well, I'm not even talking about the community. I'm pointing at the tech, like, nagging for the App, please sign in, crappy video player, please sign in, random scrolling, random page reload, try our App!
Oh yeah, it's a dumpster fire. Also, did they really kill RPAN? I don't think that's a good idea, unless they were REALLY desperate for cuts, even if it wasn't very popular.
I actually thought it filled a niche that is slightly different from what I find on twitch, youtube, facebook, ect.
I found a lot of videos of random people just doing random things. I do happen to think the community may have lost it's way... OTH the era that some people see as the golden age of reddit included stuff like the fappening.
It depends. They couldn't acquire Tiktok because it was tied to the Chinese Govt. Who is to say their biggest competitors going forward won't be unbuyable yet again? They've survived to the degree they have by important purchases like Instagram and WhatsApp but if they can't make similar key purchases going forward they are in trouble. Hence the big bet on VR that is showing no real momentum, they need something they own and built in house because it is the only "sure" way to maintain market position. Get there first.
That other network's name is TikTok, and it took over from Instagram after Instagram took over from Facebook.
This is, at least, where the valuable consumers (20-35 women are by far the most valuable from an advertising perspective) are spending the most time, even if they still have FB accounts.
facebook and tiktok serve completely different niches, as much as mark doesn't want to admit it. Tiktoks network is billions of people, facebook still controls the "social" network. That may be less important as people transition to online personalities, but I don't see the demand for an actual social network of real life friends/acquaintances going away anytime soon.
The problems isn't that the cool kids went somewhere else. The problem is that the cool kids never really meant anything. People's attention shifted to different "cool kids" then the old "cool kids" adapted.
Worse outcomes than gambling? Please explain how an average of 7% YoY growth after inflation over long periods of time throughout the history of the stock market is a worse outcome than gambling.
Huge caveats there and one-offs during that period which will likely not be repeated.
1) American population ~60M -> 330M since 1900.
2) Only country w/out capital destruction from WWI and WWII.
3) International money flight (Vietnam, ex. Soviet states) into U.S.
4) Saudi oil $ recycled into US markets (& others due to reserve currency status)
5) Rise of index funds and transferring "hidden" liabilities (pensions) into explicit liabilities (retirement funds, 401ks). Turning the market into a retirement scheme (look at solvency of social security; if people actually withdraw money to retire, normal market will have same issues)
Basically, the market is driven by liquidity and it has become a lot easier to get money into the market over the last ~50 years.
Many tech companies living in fantasy land, having gotten used to free money and strong organic growth essentially guaranteed from secular tailwinds. At a certain scale, and level of competition (more and more social/advertising platforms becoming popular), these companies become more cyclical rather than guaranteed growth bets.
Google is a great company that will surely be worth more down the line, but the whole hire as fast as possible and pay increasingly high comp is going to have to come in line with the new reality.
You can't expand headcount and employment costs faster than your revenue/profit growth and expect it to end well
There will always be some leading parameters some lagging parameters. It makes a difference when you are overly leveraged or if you are too small but big companies like google, Amazon, apple should be able to manage some level of forecast leading or lagging the demand, no?
Sure, it’s important not to overindex on short term fluctuations.
But their employment expense and headcount growth is far, far ahead of their revenue growth. A recession next year is pretty much inevitable at this point due to inflation dynamics and Fed policy.
Having their stock get hammered even worse as revenues contract and margin compression eats into earnings is going to lead to many more problems for them in the future than if they just slow the pace of hiring now.
They may even be doing layoffs this time next year, which is much easier to avoid if you don’t overhire leading into a recession
googles net profit is still a whopping 14 billy dollars. their search monopoly isn't going anywhere anytime soon either. i don't think googlers have anything to worry about
Absolute net profit means nothing without relating it to valuation.
$14B is not that significant for a trillion dollar company. It's all relative.
Google may be fair value or may not, but ignoring proper approaches to valuation is a good way to lose your money... as many younger investors are starting to learn.
Yet they forced all Google workspace users that were grandfathered in free plans to start paying and are currently forcing grandfathered Google music (YouTube premium) family subscribers to eat a +50% price increase.
Why would I stay with Google if my loyalty counts for nothing?
Same goes for Netflix, if you aren't going to reward me being with you from day 1 why should I show you any loyalty?
I will take full advantage of any free trials and cancled at the end switching from one to the other.
iOS has an ad-free YouTube app? Or do you mean a Safari adblocker and then watching all your YouTube in Safari where the experience sucks? What if I want to AirPlay? What about Chromecast?
I didn’t even blink when I saw the cost of a family plan for YouTube+YouTube Music increase. My wife and I prefer YouTube Music to Apple Music (which we get from an Apple+ family plan) and we watch a lot on YouTube. I know that there are tools to block YouTube ads, but it seems more ethical to me to pay for something we use hours a day.
Pardon some humor: I laugh when non-tech friends don’t want to pay for ad-free YouTube but they will spend a ton of money every month at Starbucks.
Between lots of quality material on philosophy, beautiful background nature videos, Lex Firdman interviews, online class materials, Dust sci-fi short films, etc., etc. YouTube is probably the best value of anything I spend money for.
Because my wife has been retired for a long time, we subscribe to just about every streaming service. Whenever other services’ prices go up, I sort of resent it but not with YouTube.
It is true that “internal ads” that people place inside of their content seem to be more prevalent. I don’t see other ads on YouTube.
Profits are hugely volatile due to weird accounting rules (e.g. if a company holds a publicly traded subsidiary, and that sub's price drops in the quarter, all the capital loss is counted immediately as negative for "net profit" now, IIRC due to recent accounting changes).
Better proxy to look at top line if you want a really rough picture of overall health.
Otherwise, you need to make meticulous adjustments to bottom line, justify those adjustments, and only then do you do a bit better than top line.
If a company’s asset goes down, why shouldn’t that be considered a loss? There doesn’t seem to be anything weird about that. Am I misunderstanding the reporting?
Large companies have a ton of “cash” — but it’s not really cash, it’s parked in equities of other companies. If the whole market goes down and those equities are worth less, yes, the company is less valuable overall so market cap should be lowered but is it indicative of the company’s success as a business?
I would say so, because part of a company’s business is choosing what to invest its cash in. If a company is making bad investments (or viewed as bad in the current market), then that should reflect in its price, and reporting that information helps catalyze that.
I wonder if Google would reconsider their approach to banning so many people from various programs like AdSense at some point. So many people have been screwed over that they should be making money from. And bad actors in many locations have a much easier time just creating a new company to circumvent the ban anyway.
I'd be very nervous about being a GCP customer right now. Cloud services is hemorrhaging cash. How long before Google pulls the rug out from underneath a bunch of the services on GCP that aren't making money?
>I'd be very nervous about being a GCP customer right now.
If you use Google specific functionality, then yes,you have reasons to worry. If you are host agnostic and use Google cloud just as a deployment target, then you shouldn't worry.
I'm not sure it's a realistic assumption to be able to use GCP without _any_ Google specific functionality. In an enterprise environment, even if you run your workloads on bare VMs, there are usually still things like networking, IAM, etc. that are Google specific. In my experience, there is no way to make all of your components completely cloud agnostic unless you heavily abstract everything using a 3rd party service in which case you might have just kicked the can down the road.
I tell people this all the time. I just get laughed out of a room. GOOGLE WILL SUNSET GCP. They don't work on it, they hate the product, the UI is terrible, they don't use it internally. It is 8 years? behind AWS. The GCP product is designed at scale to compete with AWS ($$) - there just isn't the customer base for 8 year old dying cloud infra. So they are throwing cash at this beast which has NO future. [I manage 300k monthly spend on GCP - and they cut off the ability to get support - we can't afford it - they cut off all communication]. The only people on it are the trapped [bigquery] or stupid.
I highly doubt that they would ever just sunset GCP entirely. That would be committing suicide. No company would ever trust them ever again for anything even remotely important.
However, they will absolutely shutdown some of the other value-add services like AI-as-a-service and some of these others that are probably not being heavily used.
>they will absolutely shutdown some of the other value-add services
They need to be competitive, and to do so, they must be at least feature pairing with AWS/Azure. I can't think of a single service they can simply shutdown.
Actually they need to build more.
I am an AWS long time user. I have toyed around with GCP, and I found it a very disconnected platform. They don't seem to have a unified story around it.
AWS is not perfect, but it is just waaaay ahead. You can tell, they are a heavy customer centric company.
GCP is the fastest growing Google product, and its revenue growth rate is much higher than its costs growth.
So (1) there’s a clear path to profitability and (2) it’s Google’s best story so far for a revenue stream beyond ads.
They’ve been saying for several years now with every financial report that they see a huge opportunity in cloud and will continue investing. They definitely don’t lack the cash flow to continue.
Google, went from ~$60 (March 2020) to ~$145 (August 2021) .. that's more than ~140% in ~1y ??? Did revenue grow that much to justify this crazy appreciation?
Now, it sits at around ~$95, still ~50% gain since pre-covid ...
I think the 2020 was a bubble and as such was not sustainable. Things are simply normalizing.
And don't get me started on stocks like TWLO, ZM, etc ...
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] threadGiven that Google dominates email, search, browsers, phones, creator video, and a laundry list more things... it's definitely indicative of a story.
Sure this isn't the end of the world but clearly the market doesn't believe this is a "non-deal".
We're also absolutely seeing a broader shift in the tech space, and traditionally companies like Google have been more immune to market changes than others.
But of course the current mantra of HN is "this is fine", it's part of a broader trend of denialism in the community that major shifts, towards things being worse, in many parts of our lives are happening.
IE, why is this story on the front page of HN and why is it important? What is the narrative you get from this?
9.63% actually
> that is no big deal in the grand scheme of things
I'm not sure how you are making this claim. Today is the 2nd largest single daily drop in GOOG in the last 10 years the company (as a precent).
The 1st largest drop was on 3/16/2020 The 3rd was on 3/12/2020
That means we are seeing early pandemic level drops in a price over an earnings call.
Both of those other drops where due to systemic shocks to the market, this drop reflects just GOOG.
So this is arguably the largest single day decline in the share price of GOOG due solely to their own performance, not do to macro trends.
> why is this story on the front page of HN and why is it important?
As already answered this is a historic decline in the price of GOOG.
> What is the narrative you get from this?
The larger story is that we're seeing a down turns in all the companies that where the hallmark of the current tech boom. The term FAANG originated because those stock were seen as incredibly strong, high growth stocks.
The big part of this story is, as I have mentioned, these companies aren't losing value because of an industry trend that is equally effecting all stocks (that's happening as well) but because of their own individual performance.
Look everyone: economies are cyclic. We had a boom. Now we're in a downturn. It's happened before, many times. It will happen again. Nothing happening today is remotely as scary as what we saw in 2008, frankly isn't nearly as disruptive as the 2001 crash.
Google will be fine. The tech industry will be fine. Buy the dip, if you're into that sort of thing.
As what's happening "today" is basically a postponed and amplified version of what should have happened in 2008, I have to disagree.
I don't think today's economy is anything like the frothy housing bubble was in 2007/2008 timeframe.
I think there's a possibility of a tech bubble akin to 2001, but that actually wasn't very disruptive for our economy. I see today more similar to 2001, aside from the weird supply chain issues due to a greatly diminished workforce (the Baby Boomer's retirement is the biggest challenge for this year IMO). (Of course, people have been calling a bubble in tech for decades now, but _eventually_ that damn tech bubble will pop again, lol)
edit to add: we already see a drying up of ad spends. What happens in an economy built on selling ads, or selling services to people who sell ads when ads sales fail to meet expectations for too long? Everyone forgets data-driven advertising is what saved tech after the crash. Public opinion is rapidly turning against that savior.
Brands will keep spending to keep their customers, and cheaper alternatives will keep spending on ads to promote their sales.
In competitive market and free economy ads are a fundamental engine that will keep economy running. Ads is sort of toll booth that takes their cut no matter what
They failed to achieve their own predictions on both EPS and revenue, by quite a bit on EPS, and that is indeed a story.
"We are creating value" is code word for "we're increasing the price of the service, and showing you a bunch of stuff you don't use".
Guess the ad-sense money button broke and now they have to try and milk other services.
If Apple begins blocking their trackers (see Google's recent worldwide Chrome ad campaigns - a campaign that likely sees the writing on the wall), they lose all Apple revenue.
If 10B market cap companies begin to campaign for antitrust, and Microsoft negotiates for Bing on Apple, Samsung, and Firefox, Google will lose everywhere else.
I honestly don't even see why Microsoft couldn't play equally dirty and revert Chrome's default search engine on Windows to Bing. It's an equally dirty move to the stuff Google has done.
Google could have a strong cloud product, but they're in distant third and aren't investing enough to take away AWS/Azure market share. Their culture of launching products for promo, launching competing products (eg messengers), and then killing them has severely damaged their reputation.
Also, Google has Android ie. largest OS in terms of user-base.
I think bing is better, but google still actually dominates search with a great product, compared to their competitors.
Building their own platforms was a brilliant idea that made Google resilient against competition owning their Ad delivery platforms.
This has nothing to so with the side hobby that's Play Store.
What platform did they build though?
Android was bought from a third party. YouTube was bought. Chromium was forked from Webkit. Every of Google's in-house projects besides search engine and ad network was a failure.
Intellectual laziness of your "takedown" reminds me of that dude that pronounced Dropbox pointless because rsync is enough.
They've been shoveling their ad revenues desperately into a furnace of "everything but ads", throwing ideas against numerous walls to see what sticks, and copying other company's product roadmaps. Almost none of it has worked out. They're still dependent on that ad revenue firehose for 90-ish percent of their profits.
When that firehose slows, the only way to maintain things will be to cut costs. So in a way I'm glad I got out of working there before that era began. "Fun" times there have been slowing for years, but it's going to get serious, I think.
Not as bad as Facebook, though.
Google seems both fragile and sloppy. How they managed to get a bigger/faster slap on the wrist for antitrust in the EU than Apple is a demonstration of this.
Edit: I was downvoted, but I stand by what I wrote. Google has Android and (for now) superior search results. Netflix has content (including their own, not just other people's). Apple has their devices, which are killing it right now. These companies will be okay. It is Facebook that might not exist in 5 years. What do they actually have other than fickle network effects that can be here today and gone tomorrow? VR? That won't save them.
There definitely are a lot of people that interact with Facebook less, which is obviously huge. I'm not sure these other social media sites will eat up Facebooks core business.
It seems like Facebook could continue to struggle to grow, but these sites seem to fill different roles. I could definitely see Facebook becoming little more than a calendar/messaging system.
Maybe it will collapse eventually, but what we saw with MySpace was pretty extreme, total, and sudden. It happened to Digg too, but wasn't this around the same time as the MySpace stuff was happening? I don't see much reason to think Reddit is going anywhere, either.
We'll see, I wouldn't be shocked either way.
Also, as a side note was getting sick of all the health and fitness cults. I got fed up getting banned for arguments with someone insulting me because I suggested that consuming massive amounts of fat might have negative health consequences, or that deadlifts are a frequent source of injury, both severe and chronic, or that peanut butter is actually one of the purest foods you can buy (seriously, read the label, it's almost entirely peanuts and salt)...
It got so frustrating. I understand that there's counter arguments to this stuff, but these are very mainstream and rational beliefs, including with people that know what they're talking about. It seemed like the safer advise was being shouted down.
I actually thought it filled a niche that is slightly different from what I find on twitch, youtube, facebook, ect.
I found a lot of videos of random people just doing random things. I do happen to think the community may have lost it's way... OTH the era that some people see as the golden age of reddit included stuff like the fappening.
They can acquire other companies, basically thats how they have survived for a longtime.
This is, at least, where the valuable consumers (20-35 women are by far the most valuable from an advertising perspective) are spending the most time, even if they still have FB accounts.
The problems isn't that the cool kids went somewhere else. The problem is that the cool kids never really meant anything. People's attention shifted to different "cool kids" then the old "cool kids" adapted.
Stock market is gambling and wishful thinking, but with worse outcomes.
1) American population ~60M -> 330M since 1900.
2) Only country w/out capital destruction from WWI and WWII.
3) International money flight (Vietnam, ex. Soviet states) into U.S.
4) Saudi oil $ recycled into US markets (& others due to reserve currency status)
5) Rise of index funds and transferring "hidden" liabilities (pensions) into explicit liabilities (retirement funds, 401ks). Turning the market into a retirement scheme (look at solvency of social security; if people actually withdraw money to retire, normal market will have same issues)
Basically, the market is driven by liquidity and it has become a lot easier to get money into the market over the last ~50 years.
Many tech companies living in fantasy land, having gotten used to free money and strong organic growth essentially guaranteed from secular tailwinds. At a certain scale, and level of competition (more and more social/advertising platforms becoming popular), these companies become more cyclical rather than guaranteed growth bets.
Google is a great company that will surely be worth more down the line, but the whole hire as fast as possible and pay increasingly high comp is going to have to come in line with the new reality.
You can't expand headcount and employment costs faster than your revenue/profit growth and expect it to end well
But their employment expense and headcount growth is far, far ahead of their revenue growth. A recession next year is pretty much inevitable at this point due to inflation dynamics and Fed policy.
Having their stock get hammered even worse as revenues contract and margin compression eats into earnings is going to lead to many more problems for them in the future than if they just slow the pace of hiring now.
They may even be doing layoffs this time next year, which is much easier to avoid if you don’t overhire leading into a recession
$14B is not that significant for a trillion dollar company. It's all relative.
Google may be fair value or may not, but ignoring proper approaches to valuation is a good way to lose your money... as many younger investors are starting to learn.
What’s your point?
Why would I stay with Google if my loyalty counts for nothing?
Same goes for Netflix, if you aren't going to reward me being with you from day 1 why should I show you any loyalty?
I will take full advantage of any free trials and cancled at the end switching from one to the other.
Sure, I'll go get my ad-free YouTube from the competition
that leaves crappy settop boxes
yes
> What if I want to AirPlay? What about Chromecast?
"that leaves crappy settop boxes"
Pardon some humor: I laugh when non-tech friends don’t want to pay for ad-free YouTube but they will spend a ton of money every month at Starbucks.
Between lots of quality material on philosophy, beautiful background nature videos, Lex Firdman interviews, online class materials, Dust sci-fi short films, etc., etc. YouTube is probably the best value of anything I spend money for.
Have you looked the change in your grocery bills in that time? Prices are going up everywhere.
It is true that “internal ads” that people place inside of their content seem to be more prevalent. I don’t see other ads on YouTube.
Are you saying Netflix shouldn't raise your rate because you subscribed from day 1?
I don't like cost increases either, but this seems like a weird thing to demand.
I think consumers have just come to expect investors to subsidize forever. It’s had a market distorting effect for too long
Better proxy to look at top line if you want a really rough picture of overall health.
Otherwise, you need to make meticulous adjustments to bottom line, justify those adjustments, and only then do you do a bit better than top line.
If you use Google specific functionality, then yes,you have reasons to worry. If you are host agnostic and use Google cloud just as a deployment target, then you shouldn't worry.
Sunsetting GCP will immensely damage their reputation.
However, they will absolutely shutdown some of the other value-add services like AI-as-a-service and some of these others that are probably not being heavily used.
They need to be competitive, and to do so, they must be at least feature pairing with AWS/Azure. I can't think of a single service they can simply shutdown. Actually they need to build more.
I am an AWS long time user. I have toyed around with GCP, and I found it a very disconnected platform. They don't seem to have a unified story around it.
AWS is not perfect, but it is just waaaay ahead. You can tell, they are a heavy customer centric company.
While I'm usually nervous about Google discontinuing things, they'd be idiots to cancel something with $6B in revenue growing that fast.
Now, it sits at around ~$95, still ~50% gain since pre-covid ...
I think the 2020 was a bubble and as such was not sustainable. Things are simply normalizing.
And don't get me started on stocks like TWLO, ZM, etc ...