Compar started a Poll on whether now was a good time to short GOOG. Short GOOG? Interesting that there is such an even split of POVs. In terms of Technical Analaysis (from a Trading, not an Investing perspective), in my opinion GOOG's stock price is looking quite vulnerable right now.
I do agree that its more of a fad than anything that drove the stock up. Perhaps as time passes and competition becomes better google will indeed sink. Yahoo is still more popular than google in overall visiters, but thats because of all the content yahoo provides. i think google recently surpassed time warner in terms of value. yahoo is ready to compete. look at how much yahoo has changed in a short while. they are realising they need to step it up. see how fast they upped the yahoo mail inboxes? they want a fight.
The price you see for stocks has nothing to do with the amount of money the company is worth. Microsoft stock trades at around $25, but has 10.8 Billion shares, making it have a value (market capitalization) of $274 billion. Google has 278 million shares, and trades around $282 today. Their market capitalization is currently at around $79 billion. So, Microsoft is still worth about 3.5x Google. I see the fact that they don't have an actual product as one of their strongest attributes. They have something much more valuable: intellectual property worth billions and billions, a brand name worth an extrordinary amount, proprietary software, algorithims, and hardware configurations. Not to mention a high margin, low overhead business model bringing in billions of dollars in profits. Competition is the only thing I see with the potential to hurt their business significantly. But with some of the smartest people in the world working for them, I think they'll stay ahead of the game.
Well said, and I couldn't agree more. Google's most valuable asset is its intellectual property. As a former employee, I can tell you that I have unlimited faith in what this company will do. Its main 'intellectual property', however, is not in its products or services, but in the brain-trust of top notch engineers and marketing gurus behind the scenes. They hire only the best of the best.... and trust me, the sky is the limit.
Just my $0.02, but when I look at G, I see a very vulnerable company. I remember when they first came out and all of us at the NOC were like this is the best ever. As the company needed to start making money, adsense proved to be a very lucrative way to help advertisers get there ads on thousands of sites; the publishers make money, G makes money, and the advertisers get more traffic to make more money. I see Adsense as their biggest strength and their biggest weakness. As a publisher I have noticed my PPC to almost drop in half, I have to provide 2X as much traffic just to recoup. If Y! and MSN launch their competition in this market for publishers and paid them at least what I was making before, I would switch in a heartbeat. No real loyalty when it comes to paying the bills. MSN will also launch their new OS and with their new focus on search I can see that as a very big threat. Basically, G's bread and butter can just as easily slip away from them and they are WAAAYYY overvalued. The next best thing may be just around the corner.
i mean it's better than askjeeves and msn search and yahoo!!!!! DEFINITELY! and this is so lame i mean you guys come on here to argue about SEARCH ENEGINES!!?? get a life!
Phatty, it's a SEARCH ENGINE forum, yes they argue about them, so what, most of us who are in the real world rely heavily on search engines, so, before telling someone to get a life, maybe you should finish school and actually experience real life.
AH..... I think everyone will get tired of searching for a local business and getting 80% crap back vs searching for a business and getting 95% worth of local business content (see sig) lol. Google does have many national advertisers who are willing to spend bookoo bucks to get brand awareness and "HITS" (MY GOD I hate the word hits! Visitors is so much better ) the Yellow Pages online or IYP will take a chunk out of google. Unfortunately for Google - Google Local does not provide any info to assist a buyer in purchasing. When it comes to research--------GOOGLE is KING
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Yellow Pages were around long before Google. Why is it you are proposing that they will steal their market share and put them out of business? If that was even possible, wouldn't it have happened already?
Think about it, how does a company compete against Micro$oft? You just can't. M$ is socking away a billion dollars a month. But if all your products are free, M$ can't underprice you, that, in my humble opinion, is Google's model. And since Google has all those smart people, the free products are going to keep flowing, just to keep those adsense ads flowing. Has anyone taken a look at google's map service. In seconds you can get not only a map showing where your house is, but a sattelite picture too. I wouldn't be surprised if anything done with a computer will be done through Google for free. If they could just do an operating system for free . . .
Not to mention they make it easy for people to use it for their own purposes. Even though it violates their TOS (so if they had to they could crack down), they allow these sites. Its a perfect advertisement Just look at the uses that are popping up: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=18183 Each one of those sites further puts the Google name in peoples minds. Its hard to throw money at that.
Have you not heard of the 'advertising industry' or the 'service industry'? Google put everything else on it's ass because it innovated. Innovation is the key to it's future success imo and the key to any other tech company's ability to dethrone them - any big or small company can do it.... just gotta think outta the box as Google did originally and innovate further.
consider... anything that links buyers and sellers takes a chunk from google... which keeps google from becomming "GOD" which with the genius' that run the joint it very well could have been!
I think they should bring out an instant messenger that links up with Gmail. I'd use it in a flash if it had the same clean, simple interface all of its other products have, and I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to convince most of the rest of the world to follow suit too. They need to maintain diversification at the rate they're going now. They have the right idea. That's why their stock keeps going up, not because maybe their ad profits are increasing, but because they're diversifying, which reduces risk and puts them in a stronger, more stable position.
google will never sink!!!!! i know thats what they said about the "titanic" but it's true i mean i use it evryrday and i have never had a problem with it!!