Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Announces Q3 2011 Financial Results, Google+ has 40 million users

investor.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 66 posts

Re: Google Announces Q3 2011 Financial Results, Google+ has 40 million users

#11

Post by haberdasher »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #9
dcurtis wrote: post #6

"Cash – As of September 30, 2011, cash, cash equivalents, and short-term marketable securities were $42.6 billion." During this quarter, Google made $302 million on interest alone. That's an impressive 11% of this quarter's net profit. I wonder what they plan to do with all that money.

Buy patents apparently :-) More seriously, I asked once about this when they were removing bottled water from the local mini-kitchens and dropping over 1 billion dollars a quarter into the bank. My question was "Gee, can't you spare a couple of million this quarter to keep the bottled water restocked?" and obviously the answer was that they could not. But from a corporate/strategic point of view having a lot of cash…

Removing bottled water is not a financial decision, but an environmental one. Every new employee is given a water bottle they can fill with water an infinite number of times.

If they took away bottled water, I'm sure they replaced them with fruit juice, organic teas and all sorts of ambrosia.

Re: Google Announces Q3 2011 Financial Results, Google+ has 40 million users

#12

Post by deltaqueue »

Just a datapoint, but out of all the invitations I sent out when G+ first launched (100-150, I don't recall), 40 or 50 friends signed up. ~3 of them still use it at least once a week.

From my observations, G+ still seems to consist primarily of three major user groups:

  1. Tech celebrities
  2. Technologists in general
  3. Non-US users
Facebook's feature set is killer, but at some point, I really would like to use some social software that doesn't silently launch a blinking GPS signal when I'm reading my news feed (I know, I can disable it, but still...).

Re: Google Announces Q3 2011 Financial Results, Google+ has 40 million users

#13

Post by mburns »

dcurtis wrote: post #6

"Cash – As of September 30, 2011, cash, cash equivalents, and short-term marketable securities were $42.6 billion." During this quarter, Google made $302 million on interest alone. That's an impressive 11% of this quarter's net profit. I wonder what they plan to do with all that money.

Am I missing something? $302 million on $42 billion is <1% return.

Re: Google Announces Q3 2011 Financial Results, Google+ has 40 million users

#15

Post by aprescott »

I know I need to just be patient and wait for Apps users to get Profiles/Plus, but I don't find it particularly sympathetic of Google when they keep saying that "everyone" can use Google+ now, even in their financial results announcements. From the CEO.

(Yes, technically anyone can use it by signing up with a free @gmail.com account, but I consider that a cop out.)

Re: Google Announces Q3 2011 Financial Results, Google+ has 40 million users

#16

Post by joebadmo »

aprescott wrote: post #15

I know I need to just be patient and wait for Apps users to get Profiles/Plus, but I don't find it particularly sympathetic of Google when they keep saying that "everyone" can use Google+ now, even in their financial results announcements. From the CEO. (Yes, technically anyone can use it by signing up with a free @gmail.com account, but I consider that a cop out.)

After reading Steve Yegge's "platforms" rant, I'm starting to see examples of it everywhere in Google products. This seems like a prime example.

Re: Google Announces Q3 2011 Financial Results, Google+ has 40 million users

#17

Post by mikeryan »

mburns wrote: post #13
dcurtis wrote: post #6

"Cash – As of September 30, 2011, cash, cash equivalents, and short-term marketable securities were $42.6 billion." During this quarter, Google made $302 million on interest alone. That's an impressive 11% of this quarter's net profit. I wonder what they plan to do with all that money.

Am I missing something? $302 million on $42 billion is <1% return.

Am I missing something? $302 million on $42 billion is

Yeah, net profit was 2.73 billion, 302 million of which was made on interest. $42 billion is total cash on hand.

Re: Google Announces Q3 2011 Financial Results, Google+ has 40 million users

#18

Post by Steko »

mburns wrote: post #13
dcurtis wrote: post #6

"Cash – As of September 30, 2011, cash, cash equivalents, and short-term marketable securities were $42.6 billion." During this quarter, Google made $302 million on interest alone. That's an impressive 11% of this quarter's net profit. I wonder what they plan to do with all that money.

Am I missing something? $302 million on $42 billion is <1% return.

Why would this comment be downvoted? He's pointing out the interest is not all that impressive and if that's 11% of profit then the results are probably even less impressive then claimed.

Re: Google Announces Q3 2011 Financial Results, Google+ has 40 million users

#19

Post by sundar22in »

I don't think Google+ will ever be a Facebook killer (Is Bing a Google killer?). Google's strengths are search and advertising, but not social networking. Given that Google+ is integrated to many google products, its not going to die soon IMHO, but it will be just there for sometime (Yahoo/excite never closed after google success).

Contrary example is gmail which caused a dent in Yahoo mail and still gaining momentum. But gmail was re-inventing email access (gtalk integration), but Google+ is no way close to revolutionizing social networking.

Re: Google Announces Q3 2011 Financial Results, Google+ has 40 million users

#20

Post by robryan »

mburns wrote: post #13
dcurtis wrote: post #6

"Cash – As of September 30, 2011, cash, cash equivalents, and short-term marketable securities were $42.6 billion." During this quarter, Google made $302 million on interest alone. That's an impressive 11% of this quarter's net profit. I wonder what they plan to do with all that money.

Am I missing something? $302 million on $42 billion is <1% return.

For the quarter, which would be over 3% for the year. Which doesn't seem to bad if your not putting your money into overly risky things. Treasury bonds may be yielding less?
Post reply on HN