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Google Will Eat Itself

googlewilleatitself.com

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Re: Google Will Eat Itself

#71

Post by adventured »

rgbrenner wrote: post #38
YZF wrote: post #4

I thought the share class structuring of Google was such that you can never own Google by buying its publicly traded shares?

You're right.. Class A is traded publicly. Class B is what's owned by Sergey and Brin, and it has 10 votes per share (vs 1 vote per share for Class A), and allows them to outvote all Class A shares.

Schmidt also owns Class B shares. I believe at the time the B shares were issued, between Brin, Page, and Schmidt they held over 50% of voting control (it was something close to 20/20/10 on voting control).

edit correction: "Mr. Page, Mr. Brin and Mr. Schmidt collectively already control 66 percent of the vote through special Class B shares."

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/04/16/stock-split-for-googl...

Re: Google Will Eat Itself

#72

Post by tqi »

"We deconstruct the new global advertisment mechanisms"

The ad supported model isn't ideal, but if these guys have a better idea I'm all ears.

Re: Google Will Eat Itself

#73

Post by Aardwolf »

pinaceae wrote: post #70
maaaats wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your contribution.. This , vs . is often a problem, because my bank will issue tables with , used as decimal separator, but copying that into some tool everything breaks because it expects . to be used.

his frustration stems from the fact that even after at least 50 years of software development the handling of number formatting (and add in dates for fun) is still something where time and time again software developers fuck up. it is amazing, all those CS and other courses and still every new generation of (predominantly) US developers discover the fact that there is a world outside the US. the most dominant data po…

Impossible to easily solve programatically. E.g. 400,123: what is it? You cannot know unambiguously.

And using OS language settings won't help either. Im from Europe but would not want to require using "," for the decimal separator enforced by OS settings, or anything related to programming or communicating with people on the Internet would become difficult.

I'd much rather have just everyone use the same convention for this. The C-locale convention for example. But for dates, please don't use the non-sorted American order. For dates the Japanese have it right :)

Re: Google Will Eat Itself

#74

Post by Lerc »

Aqueous wrote: post #3

"Current Google Share Price : 495.01 USD" This hasn't been updated since GOOG was a bit more than a third of what it is now. But if they actually own 819 shares that is almost a million dollars of stock right now. Edit: http://gwei.org/pages/google/legalletter1.html

So has it been operating all this time since 2006?

Most interesting would be a graph of proportion of Google owned. Are they gaining or losing ground toward their goal of getting it all. I could see them gaining at an ever diminishing rate.

While this is probably fraud, it's preying on advertisers, which I'd be prepared to allow provided it did the advertising industry permanent harm.

Re: Google Will Eat Itself

#75

Post by Link- »

pinaceae wrote: post #70
maaaats wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your contribution.. This , vs . is often a problem, because my bank will issue tables with , used as decimal separator, but copying that into some tool everything breaks because it expects . to be used.

his frustration stems from the fact that even after at least 50 years of software development the handling of number formatting (and add in dates for fun) is still something where time and time again software developers fuck up. it is amazing, all those CS and other courses and still every new generation of (predominantly) US developers discover the fact that there is a world outside the US. the most dominant data po…

"it is amazing, all those CS and other courses and still every new generation of (predominantly) US developers discover the fact that there is a world outside the US."

Best statement I've read on HN for months now.

Re: Google Will Eat Itself

#76

Post by yetanotherphd »

vesinisa wrote: post #43
YZF wrote: post #4

I thought the share class structuring of Google was such that you can never own Google by buying its publicly traded shares?

Can someone then explain to a layman, why Google shares even have any value? What good is a share, if it's voting power in controlling the company is practically void? Google has never paid any dividend either. Are all the stock investors just speculating that GOOG will pay dividend in the future? Or is it possible that Class B shares will loose their special voting rights at some point so that Class A become instrum…

It's extremely simple:

The only real value a share has is dividends, and dividend-like things (like share buybacks, the whole company being taken private, etc.).

In theory (and practice) the price of a stock is the expected value of the time-discounted sum of its future dividends.

So yes, people are precisely buying GOOG stock because they believe that at some point in the future, they will pay dividends. Google do, after all, have to do something with all their money one day.

Voting is also not very important. In some cases it might be needed to keep the board/executives in line, but for an individual shareholder, the right to vote is of no importance.

Re: Google Will Eat Itself

#77

Post by gommm »

pinaceae wrote: post #70
maaaats wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your contribution.. This , vs . is often a problem, because my bank will issue tables with , used as decimal separator, but copying that into some tool everything breaks because it expects . to be used.

his frustration stems from the fact that even after at least 50 years of software development the handling of number formatting (and add in dates for fun) is still something where time and time again software developers fuck up. it is amazing, all those CS and other courses and still every new generation of (predominantly) US developers discover the fact that there is a world outside the US. the most dominant data po…

That's led to one of the most marking bug I've had As a kid, I developed an education in software in visual basic. The software I had developed worked fine on my computer but when I installed it to any other computer it would fail.

It took me a long time to find out the issue. I was saving files in CSV using standards methods from Visual Basic. By default, the decimal separator in French is a comma. When Visual Basic saved a number in the CSV file, it saved it with the comma and without escaping or quoting. When the file was read back, the decimal part of the number was thought to be another column...

The only reason, it worked on my computer is that I had set up the decimal separator to a dot there because I found it more readable.

Re: Google Will Eat Itself

#78

Post by lutusp »

yetanotherphd wrote: post #76
vesinisa wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone then explain to a layman, why Google shares even have any value? What good is a share, if it's voting power in controlling the company is practically void? Google has never paid any dividend either. Are all the stock investors just speculating that GOOG will pay dividend in the future? Or is it possible that Class B shares will loose their special voting rights at some point so that Class A become instrum…

It's extremely simple: The only real value a share has is dividends, and dividend-like things (like share buybacks, the whole company being taken private, etc.). In theory (and practice) the price of a stock is the expected value of the time-discounted sum of its future dividends. So yes, people are precisely buying GOOG stock because they believe that at some point in the future, they will pay dividends. Google do,…

> The only real value a share has is dividends, and dividend-like things (like share buybacks, the whole company being taken private, etc.).

This omits the value of the share itself, as a commodity on the open market. If your claim were true, people would refuse to invest in shares that don't pay dividends.

The primary reason to invest in shares is that they they might grow along with the (a) market as a whole, and (b) the company that issued the shares. Dividends are frosting.

> So yes, people are precisely buying GOOG stock because they believe that at some point in the future, they will pay dividends.

With all respect, do you really want to be pontificating about something you know nothing about? There are plenty of companies that don't pay dividends at all, never have, and yet have many loyal investors, for the best of reasons -- the company is growing along with the value of its stock. Instead of paying dividends, many companies put corporate profits directly back into company expenses, with the expectation that this will grow the company and its stock. And the investors agree.

Re: Google Will Eat Itself

#79

Post by yetanotherphd »

lutusp wrote: post #78
yetanotherphd wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's extremely simple: The only real value a share has is dividends, and dividend-like things (like share buybacks, the whole company being taken private, etc.). In theory (and practice) the price of a stock is the expected value of the time-discounted sum of its future dividends. So yes, people are precisely buying GOOG stock because they believe that at some point in the future, they will pay dividends. Google do,…

> The only real value a share has is dividends, and dividend-like things (like share buybacks, the whole company being taken private, etc.). This omits the value of the share itself, as a commodity on the open market. If your claim were true, people would refuse to invest in shares that don't pay dividends. The primary reason to invest in shares is that they they might grow along with the (a) market as a whole, and (…

You are correct about the empirical facts (there exist some companies don't currently pay dividends), but theory is needed to understand that if those company's never paid dividends, they would be worthless.

The fundamental principal is that of the transversality condition, also called the "no ponzi" condition, which states that assets must eventually deliver. If a company pays no dividends forever then the value of its stock is only based on what people are willing to pay in the future, forming a self-reinforcing ponzi-like system. It is generally assumed (I can think of many good reasons for this, like the finiteness of the universe) that such violations of the transversality condition don't occur.

Therefore the value of a share is the expected value of all future dividends. I suspect you also didn't read my post carefully and missed my qualification of "dividend-like" things. E.g. a company might start small, grow, stagnate and be bought by a private equity firm and split into parts that are sold off. At that point, the company has effectively delivered dividends to the private equity firm.

>With all respect, do you really want to be pontificating about something you know nothing about?

Your smugness is unwarranted and reflects badly on your character. I suggest you read some books on economics and try to be a better person.

Re: Google Will Eat Itself

#80

Post by cclogg »

pinaceae wrote: post #70
maaaats wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your contribution.. This , vs . is often a problem, because my bank will issue tables with , used as decimal separator, but copying that into some tool everything breaks because it expects . to be used.

his frustration stems from the fact that even after at least 50 years of software development the handling of number formatting (and add in dates for fun) is still something where time and time again software developers fuck up. it is amazing, all those CS and other courses and still every new generation of (predominantly) US developers discover the fact that there is a world outside the US. the most dominant data po…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DecimalSeparator.svg

It's actually pretty interestingly split, world-wide.

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