

Google Gears Down for Tougher Times - nradov
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122826503489174369.html

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jmah
What a poorly-chosen title. It took me a while to realize that "gears" is the
verb; it's not about Google Gears. Non-title capitalization could have avoided
the ambiguity.

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mynameishere
It's a pun. Editors do it _all the time_.

...

Anyway, I've never had any luck with google. Yahoo charges me 0.10 dollars for
certain keywords, while google wants 0.50. Sorry. Not worth it. It's probably
just a quirk, but as far as I'm concerned, google doesn't exist in the ad
sphere.

~~~
someperson
Remember when the users of news.ycombinator rewrote editorialized headlines?

~~~
jumper
I seem to remember that, but maybe it was just a fabled long lost golden age
of myth... when headlines were fixed, children respected their elders, and
digg content stayed on digg.

~~~
helveticaman
I'm pretty sure it was fabled. There've been people complaining about the
Diggification of HN since I started reading (but not commenting) two years
ago.

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jwstaddo2
Google is making a big mistake to associate budget with revenue. That will
align people (the most important resource) with old, established products--
i.e. the past instead of the future. By starving the future Google will become
reactionary rather than trend setting. Just like Microsoft and Oracle did.

~~~
jmtulloss
And look what happened to those guys...

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mattmaroon
"Products such as Google Checkout, a Web payment service, and Google TV Ads,
which sells television advertising time, haven't generated significant
revenue".

If Google dropped every product that doesn't return them significant revenue,
they'd be back to just good old-fashioned Google.com.

~~~
patio11
As a (~$10,000+ in sales) Checkout user, it isn't surprising to me that it
isn't generating significant revenue: you're giving me a 100% discount on it
to encourage me to increase my (drumroll please) AdWords spend.

Which makes business sense, granted, since AdWords remains a license for
Google to print money. But if it is the only product your company can bring
itself to charge for, of course it is going to be the only thing that
generates revenues!

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bandris
"Google recently hired a new chief financial officer, Patrick Pichette.
Trained in "Six Sigma" management practices -- a rigid quality-control system
designed to eliminate waste -- Mr. Pichette is looking to reduce
inefficiencies and delay spending when possible."

That is a sign that something goes bad at a company. When they implement
"scientific" methods.

~~~
minsight
Google has been so successful exactly because they use "scientific" methods.
They have a mountain of data and they put it to good use. This data includes
information about hardware, operating systems, networking, what people are
searching for, what people are watching on youtube, etc, etc, etc.

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sh1mmer
In some ways this article highlights how fragile Google is. If you think about
how quickly Google cleaned up in the search market and yet 97% of their
revenues are web Ad based (according to the article).

While not all of those are going to be Ad Words a lot will be and if someone
replaced them in search (not Cuil, obviously) then they would be in trouble,
fast.

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crsmith
Google's chief economist has been quoted as saying Google has a "GDP beta" of
one. So this shouldn't really be a surprise.

~~~
byrneseyeview
Beta, and not r-squared? A beta of one would imply that Google's revenue (or
profit?) increase exactly as much as the GDP. An r-squared of one would imply
that Google's revenue changes in proportion to GDP changes.

But he probably knows this better than I do, so presumably I'm missing
something.

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mhb
Really? I thought a beta of one means that if GDP goes up 10%, then Google's
revenue goes up 10%.

From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_coefficient>:

 _More specifically, a stock that has a beta of 2 follows the market in an
overall decline or growth, but does so by a factor of 2; meaning when the
market has an overall decline of 3% a stock with a beta of 2 will fall 6%._

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byrneseyeview
As far as I know, you are agreeing with what I said. The GDP has not gone up
90% per year any time recently.

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tyohn
humm, I wonder if this is where companies slip into bureaucratic methods and
practices. I'm all for streamlining business but "rigid quality-control system
designed to eliminate waste" could be a slippery slope to start down...

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coliveira
The title for the article is horrible. I thought it was about Google gears.

