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Google Gears Down for Tougher Times

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Re: Google Gears Down for Tougher Times

#2
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.

Re: Google Gears Down for Tougher Times

#5
post #3

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.

You beat me to it. Though technically they dropped the "Google" from the name, and now it's just "Gears".

Re: Google Gears Down for Tougher Times

#6
"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.

Re: Google Gears Down for Tougher Times

#7
post #4

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

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.

Re: Google Gears Down for Tougher Times

#8
post #3

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.

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.

Re: Google Gears Down for Tougher Times

#9

"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.

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!

Re: Google Gears Down for Tougher Times

#10

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.

And look what happened to those guys...
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