
Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2018 Results - throwaway5752
https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2018Q4_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf?cache=adc3b38
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techntoke
I had been a Google fan for a long time but they lost my business recently
because despite paying over $30/mo for G Suite and a YouTube Premium family
plan with Google Play Music, they apparently can't help tell me why they
blocked my daughter from live streaming to YouTube.

The video in question was her playing with legos, and when I disputed it
asking why they blocked her... they literally just responded saying the block
was valid without ever giving a reason. Like, what the heck Google you act
like robots. Anyway, just cancelled my Premium services because they could
never give a straight answer.

~~~
suresk
I don't know that any tech companies are good at this?

I would, a few times per year, spend $10 or $20 to promote some tweets on
Twitter. At one point, I stopped being able to do that, due to some nebulous
"violation" of their TOS. I've gone back and forth with them a handful of
times, and they always basically say "Yep, we looked into this, and you
definitely did something bad, but we won't tell you what it was or which tweet
it was in." They still send me emails and other ads trying to get me to buy
advertising, though. I don't really care, it is just kind of funny.

I don't know why they all are so bad at customer support.

~~~
benologist
My theory is they're bad at customer support because they spend nothing to
support us. That's why AT&T, Comcast etc can support ~100 million people _by
phone_ , Amazon support _a multiple of that by live chat_ and Google can't
even reply to email.

~~~
jchw
Comcast "support" is almost not better than just having robots at the other
end, never have I ever gotten a problem resolved from support, I've just had
them try to upsell me relentlessly. To this day my Comcast email is somehow
setup wrong and I no longer care to try to fix it.

~~~
suresk
Interestingly, Comcast has been one of the consistently better support
experiences for me over the years. Usually very quick and pretty helpful, even
if it is just to schedule someone to come out and look at the problem.

Their service in general has gotten kind of unreliable around here the last
year or so, with a handful of widespread outages, one of which lasted almost
an entire day, but the customer support has never been something I've been
unhappy with.

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chollida1
Pre:

\- will Porat be cutting "other bets", rumors is that other bets is in line
for a big budget cuts

\- Options implied vol is showing enough movement baked in that GOOG could
become largest company by Market Cap if the street likes their numbers, and
GOOG doesn't disappoint often

\- Like Facebook the public and wallstreet have weighed in and they love money
more than privacy.

\- analysts are not in anyway mixed about Google's prospects

\- 41 buy recommendations vs 2 hold and 0 sell

Add Revenue:

\- 4Q paid clicks on Google's own sites is up 66%, seems high enough that it's
not organic but more than likely increased advertising space on sites, forced
youtube videos, etc

\- Cost per click on Google's own sites is down 29%

Numbers:

\- 4Q profit of $8.2B est $8.7B

\- 4Q EPS $12.77

\- 4Q expenses $31.2B up from $24.7B yoy.

\- 6.85B on capex vs $3.8B yoy

\- 4Q operating margin 21% down from 24% yoy.

\- 4Q other bets lost $1.33 billion, don't hear much about these bets anymore
but that is an outsized loss in this category.

-Again they mention Verily and Waymo in passing but no details worth mentioning.

\- 4Q Add Revenue $32B

\- 4Q own site revenues $27B

Misc:

\- shares are down a bit, lots of volume, nothing out of ordinary, guessing
its mostly covering and profit taking.

\- Too bad for almost all factor models that really on trade on tech Momentum

\- The company added nearly 20,000 employees over the year. ____* WOW, double
check this, that 's a large head count addition.

\- can't find any Cloud break outs, I guess MSFT and AMZN are really beating
them, given how much of a growth engine it is for the 2 leaders I can't see
why GOOG would hid it if they were able to compete.

\- No youtube breakout of revenues, Again not a bullish sign for that
division, stil nothing on youtube on the call.

\- __EDIT __on the earnings call they did talk briefly about Youtube, no real
new numbers though, just their assurance that youtube is crushing it

\- Porat is doing gymnastics to talk about youtube but not actually say
anything about youtube. Are youtbue numbers really that bad????

\- Google was the top lobby spender of 2018, not in tech but for all
companies. Silicon Valley is now arguably bigger force than Wall Street on US
politics.

\- margins are down and spending is up, not sure if its GOOG that wants to
spend to grow or its competitors that are forcing it to compete. Either way,
this competition is great for tech salaries

\- Employees totaled 98,771 in the quarter vs 80,110 a year ago, WOW

~~~
adventured
> Silicon Valley is now arguably bigger force than Wall Street on US politics.

There's no argument there. The banks and military industrial complex have
drastically more influence and power than Silicon Valley, despite SV closing
that gap over time.

All politicians, with few exceptions, bow to the feet of the military
industrial complex. They all get in line. That's slightly less true for Wall
Street, however only slightly.

Every aspect of the US Government is dependent on the Federal Reserve and US
banking system, without exception. Silicon Valley companies come and go over
the decades, they rise and fall. JP Morgan predates the Fed and has been
critical to the US Government for over a century.

Google is a Walmart or the former GM, as far as the politicians in DC are
concerned. Powerful, rich, influential, and still not a first tier power in
DC. It never can be.

Military, weapons, currency, financing. That's the source of real power, all
of DC knows it. Everything else is just a play thing of the moment, inevitably
replaced by a new shiny play thing in the next decade or two. Long after
Google is gone, banking and military will still be around.

~~~
rock_hard
So you are saying that the company who holds all of the worlds information and
makes it publicly available is a fad?

That’s bold!

~~~
chimpburger
They don't hold the world's information. They are an advertising company with
a search engine for public websites, which are all hosted outside of Google.

~~~
netheril96
In the age of information overload, the host of information is less important
than the portal to information.

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curiousDog
The cloud bet better pay off or they’re in big trouble. Especially since
they’re the number 3 player and not the market dominant player like Ads. Will
be interesting to see how they play out

~~~
joncrane
Right now Google is niche for Big Data and ML type of stuff. Their ecosystem
has the lead as far as the best tool for the job out of the big three.

AWS is still blowing them out of the water in the "Enterprise" market, which
they are really struggling to break into, but they're pushing hard.

~~~
ForHackernews
Part of that is because "enterprise" doesn't trust Google to not drop support
on short (by enterprise standards) notice and leave them in the lurch.
Microsoft, in contrast, has spent decades building trust at large companies by
supporting old stuff essentially forever[0].

[0] [https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2015/06/navy-...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2015/06/navy-re-ups-with-microsoft-for-more-windows-xp-support/)

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gzu
The TLDR: First time in years EPS dropped Q/Q. Big increases in spending.

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TaylorSwift
I hate office google products. My work place uses it.

Google Driver File Stream is slower than share drive, along with it always
"streaming" in the background. VPNing makes it even worse.

Can't use hotkeys in Google Sheets, and there are limited functions to it as
well. I hate clicking when using Excel all day.

Chrome is slow and bloated. Sites sometimes don't render properly.

GMail is slow, and its UI isn't making things better. Notifications do not
always appear, and missing a scheduled meeting/call can be embarrassing or
make you look irresponsible -- and looking at long email threads can get
confusing.

GChat/Hangouts or whatever it's called runs within the browser, which I
entirely dislike because it takes up a fraction of what you're looking it --
so I just end up using the hangouts software.

The whole GSuite thing is only good for collaborative purposes. But it slows
down the PC so GODDAMN much that it brings inefficiencies and headache. I
really wished the employer didn't go Google and chose an alternative.

