
Google Earnings Come Early; Shares Drop - Kopion
http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2012/10/18/google-earnings-come-early-shares-drop/
======
diego
As an interesting aside, I created a word cloud with the last 1000 Hacker News
headlines to cross the 250-point threshold. I found Google was in 49 of those.
Hacker News seems to care more about Google than any other company.

<http://images.diegobasch.com/newsyc250.png>

~~~
cft
Interesting: I could not spot Facebook there easily?

~~~
ihsw
You say that like it's a bad thing.

------
revelation
I love this talk of "analysts". Did the "analysts" miss that Google just
bought a struggling 10B+ Motorola? Do they expect it to be some magic unicorn
that can turn Motorolas losses into Googles profits in a single quarter?

~~~
jmduke
This meme of 'anyone who is not a programmer is an idiot' has to stop. This is
incredibly frustrating and severely undermines the level of discourse.

~~~
zmj
Most people are bad at making predictions. This is particularly true when they
have incentives other than accuracy.

Programmers are not immune to that failure mode, but programming culture
encourages data-driven decision-making and prizes empirical results.

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forensic
> programming culture encourages data-driven decision-making

You have to be kidding.

Actuarial work, bioinformatics, social science. These are data-driven
cultures. They actually require scientifically valid and methodologically
sound data to make a claim.

Programming, on the other hand, is dominated by fashion. Language wars,
methodology wars, business bullshit, buzzword chasing. Programming is not
data-driven AT ALL! When was the last time a computer scientist actually did
some SCIENCE? When was the last time a programmer actually ran a double blind
study?

99% of programming is not data-driven whatsoever. The sweeping decisions in
programming are made by corporate big wigs operating on their intuition, or
are design choice (extremely subjective!) made by "architects" who, for
instance, created UNIX.

Were the people who created Python, Ruby, Java, C, etc DATA-DRIVEN? What
studies did they use to decide that so-and-so feature should be like this and
not like this?

Programming is mostly a craft and has essentially nothing to do with being
data-driven. Doing A-B tests does not mean your culture is data driven when
A-B tests are like 0.1% of everything you do. And most A-B tests are
methodologically unsound anyway and would be shamed out of any real social
science department.

Economics, on the other hand, is an actual science with actual data that
performs actual methodologically sound studies using advanced statistics.
Practicing economists have to use actual valid data procured from real studies
to have careers. Programmers mostly twiddle their bits around until something
works. That IS NOT being data driven.

Programming is NOT a science.

~~~
VikingCoder
Funny that you should say all of this in a discussion about Google...

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mtkd
There is a lot of good numbers in that release.

Motorola down to be expected.

PPC yields -15% is concerning but the soon to come monetization of Shopping is
going to reverse that.

The p/e is 20 vs FB at 66.

Google are still the strongest and most consistently innovative large-cap
around. They've already moved past the point that MS failed at.

Google ad systems are going to be able to subsidise hardware (TVs, phones,
tablets, cars) in a way no other company can going forwards.

~~~
tlogan
Can you please quantify the "most consistently innovative large-cap around"
comment? What Google did lately which was innovative?

I'm not trying to be anti-Google, I'm just honestly asking. For example, can
you compare innovations Google put forward in last couple of years and compare
it with, lets say, MSFT?

~~~
tensor
Self driving cars. Glass. Google Now. Maps. Plus all the internal innovation
such as new database technologies, custom routers, computer science research,
and other technology.

There are few places that compare to Google.

~~~
tlogan
Good points.

Vaporware (Self driving cars. Glass.) is not what I'm considering innovative
because these things are not in production. And IBM and MSFT are very very
good at vaporware.

Maps are not innovative (they might be the best for some people but, on my
iPhone, Nokia maps are actually better).

    
    
       There are few places that compare to Google.
    

I'm not disputing that. Google is definitely a great company. But the claim
was "the most consistently innovative large-cap around".

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tensor
The iPhone actually uses TomTom maps, not Nokia. That said, no maps but Google
maps has street view. Plus, they are moving into mapping shopping malls,
parks, stores, and even tourist spots. On top of this, they use image
recognition with their street view data to improve accuracy of their maps on
several levels.

Don't forget the sheer amount of integrated information such as transit and
traffic routes. Google maps has continually set the bar for mapping. They are
so successful that people no longer even recognize that all these features
were not commonplace prior to Google maps.

Edit: and if you define innovation to things in production, I straight up
disagree. Innovation happens prior to production.

~~~
rhplus
_no maps but Google maps has street view._

A similar feature to Streetview has existed in Bing Maps since 2009 [1].
Google was first, but others are chasing hard.

 _Plus, they are moving into mapping shopping malls, parks, stores, and even
tourist spots_

Bing Maps started adding malls and building maps in 2010. They also had
birdeye view and 3D "photosynth" views predating Google's implementations [2]
by 2 years.

[1]
[http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2009...](http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2009/12/02/bing-
maps-adds-streetside-enhanced-bird-s-eye-photosynth-and-more.aspx)

[2]
[http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2010...](http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2010/12/07/bing-
s-new-mall-maps-get-in-get-out-and-the-avoid-the-crowds.aspx)

------
uptown
Speculation is that their filing agent may have accidentally released them
early.

update: confirmed by R.R. Donnelley & Sons

~~~
jamesmcn
Google is advertising company which enjoys masquerading as a computer science
R&D lab. They build self-driving cars. They launched a satellite.

I suspect that they will start making their own SEC filings soon.

~~~
Wohlf
I think when you accomplish some of the things Google does, it becomes less of
a "advertising company which enjoys masquerading as a computer science R&D
lab" and more of "an advertising company that owns and funds a computer
science and engineering R&D lab".

~~~
jamesmcn
Advertising is where they make their money. It is nice that they do cool
things, but few of those things have anything to do with their core business.

My point was that they do a lot of fun things that aren't core to their
business. Properly filing their SEC documents might be worth a little more
attention. Not quite as sexy as self-driving cars, but if they can't keep the
core business running then they won't have time for autonomous cars.

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hodder
Well that was an easy short. RRD dropped long after your update. Nice work
Uptown!

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gfodor
Some poor bastard on another forum I read had short put options open and was
literally in the middle of closing them (due to earnings release at end of
market) with his mouse when the stock dropped.

~~~
jrockway
This doesn't sound that terrible. One enters into a short put position when he
believes that XYZ company is worth buying at $X, but not at the current price.
So you open the short put position at the $X strike price and either collect
the premium if the stock doesn't go down, or be assigned the shares at the
price you think they're worth if the stock does go down. Assuming you did your
research right, both are good positions to be in.

And remember: if a particular option you're selling has a really high premium,
it's because the market expects the position to be risky.

~~~
mynameishere
Being forced to buy 700 dollar shares at 760 (or whatever) is not a good
position to be in. Especially if you don't have the money, which happens often
enough.

~~~
jrockway
My brokerage won't even let me open the position without having enough money
to cover the share assignment.

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gfodor
kind of stoked about this, been waiting for an opportunity to go long GOOG due
to their autonomous car moat they're carving.

~~~
pclark
their autonomous car project is folly

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InclinedPlane
Prove it.

~~~
pclark
Google is incompetent at expanding into adjacent markets to search engine
marketing. That is their core competency. You think they can enter the
automobile industry? You're insane.

~~~
adrinavarro
That's why they failed at building a mobile operative system. Same happened
when they tried to get into the email business. Or the office applications
sector.

Oh…

~~~
aboodman
And web browsers :)

~~~
Steko
So this is a nice long list of reasons to "go long GOOG"? Let's add up the
billyuns they've made in:

Mobile operating system: we'll get back to you on that

Email business: brand investment!

Office applications: Literally hundreds of satisfied paying customers, a few
even break into 3 digit employee counts. Coming to offline any decade now.

Web browsers: the tracking data is worth a hundred times what we paid for in
commercials and r&d.

~~~
jpatokal
You may have missed this: <http://mashable.com/2012/06/28/google-docs-offline-
io/>

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_pferreir_
Panic anyone?

If it has indeed been an accidental release, someone is going to pay very
dearly for it.

~~~
bluekeybox
Just read some article which talks about the "fear" that consumers may be
getting smarter and increasingly relying on direct searches and mobile apps
(aka Amazon website, Amazon mobile app) instead of going through Google. If
that is correct, then it sounds like a shift in the market rather than
shrinking. Admittedly though it sounds more like a rationalization of reduced
earnings with no direct proof.

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dholowiski
Trading has been halted as well.

~~~
baltcode
Why do they do this? Isn't the whole point of the free market that the prices
stabilize quickly without interventions?

~~~
guyzero
Yeah, everyone loved the free market back in 1929.

~~~
bcoates
The 1929 stock market collapse was an accurate reflection of real-world
economic conditions, it wasn't a panic crash and it didn't cause the great
depression. There are a ton of theories about why the depression happened but
pretty much none of them claim fiddling with the stock market rules would have
helped anything.

Stock prices during the depression were reasonable, they were just news nobody
wanted to hear.

~~~
jivatmanx
Economists also think that WWII ended the depression.

As if flattening the major cities of every developed country except the U.S.
and spending the majority of the world's economic activity on objects whose
sole purpose is to destroy and be destroyed. That brought prosperity.

~~~
icebraining
Some do, others don't:
[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2008/12/higgs_on_the_gr.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2008/12/higgs_on_the_gr.html)

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Cieplak
Definitely not the first time RR Donnelley has dropped the ball.

