JSArbitrage Posted July 6, 2011 Share Posted July 6, 2011 Next, what is the most preferable email service on the web? Gmail, by a long margin. Actually, it's Yahoo, followed by Hotmail, then Gmail. http://www.winrumors.com/hotmail-94-bigger-than-gmail-according-to-latest-u-s-stats/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted July 6, 2011 Author Share Posted July 6, 2011 Next, what is the most preferable email service on the web? Gmail, by a long margin. Actually, it's Yahoo, followed by Hotmail, then Gmail. http://www.winrumors.com/hotmail-94-bigger-than-gmail-according-to-latest-u-s-stats/ Depends what you mean be "preferrable", and it depends if those statistics are reliable (third party traffic stats usually aren't.. the kind of people who install a tracking toolbar usually are the most clueless of web users, and they often seem to just make stuff up and be way off - I've been involved with a site getting tens of millions of pageviews a month and I've learned long ago not to trust these third party statistics). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moore_capital54 Posted July 6, 2011 Share Posted July 6, 2011 By preferable I meant just that. Most would agree that gmail is superior to hotmail and ymail. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted July 7, 2011 Author Share Posted July 7, 2011 Looks like even Apple is having trouble with Google's ad moat: Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s iAd mobile-advertising business has cut rates by as much as 70 percent as some marquee clients are using rival services, two people with knowledge of the matter said, signaling the company is struggling to parlay its technology leadership into success in the ad industry. When Apple rolled out iAd a year ago, companies such as Citigroup Inc. © and J.C. Penney Co. were being charged $1 million or more to run ad campaigns. Today those brands aren’t using iAd, and Apple is offering packages for as little as $300,000, said the people, who asked not to be named because the rates are private. Even with lower prices, some advertising agencies are balking at iAd’s cost, especially because the promotions only reach Apple users. They’re turning instead to Google Inc. (GOOG)’s AdMob, Millennial Media and Greystripe, which serve a range of devices. That means Apple risks losing ground in a market that will generate $2.5 billion by 2014, according to EMarketer Inc. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-07/apple-s-iad-mobile-ad-service-said-to-cut-prices-as-clients-turn-to-rivals.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted July 8, 2011 Author Share Posted July 8, 2011 [this is cross-posted from the MSFT thread. I thought it fit better here] All right, after a (too short) night of sleep, here's the outline of how I see this for GOOG: How does Google prefer to make money? Where have they the highest margins and biggest moat? -Search ads are extremely profitable because 1) They are targeted. You know the intention of the user because they just searched for "stainless steel fridge" so if you show them ads for stainless fridges, you'll get a lot more value than if you show fridge ads on facebook where people's intention is mostly to check up on their friends. That's why some keywords are worth many dollars per click while less targeted ads are often worth fractions of pennies. 2) Ads shown on the Adsense and Doubleclick networks are also profitable, but google has to share money raised in the auction with the publishers. Ads on Google's own sites don't share any of the money. Another reason search is preferable for them. -So how does Android fit into all this? 1) In 2007 when the Google guys saw the iPhone and realized that in the future a lot more of the web was going to be consumed on mobile devices, and that they had to make sure their products were well positioned for that and that those who controlled that mobile platform couldn't harm them, they could have said: "all right, we're going into the phone business and we'll compete directly with Apple" and maybe a year later they could have had a phone like the Nexus One. They could have tried to make money from the hardware and the apps, but the problem would've been: 2) They're a software company. They don't have tons of industrial designers, they don't have a large distribution network and retail outlets, they don't have supplier relationships, etc. So they could have tried to turn the ship around and become a whole other kind of company to compete with Apple, but the problem is, chances of success would be low and if they became a phone maker, and they wouldn't just be competing with Apple, they'd also be competing against RIM, Samsung, Motorola, HTC, etc. 3) Maybe they could have licensed their OS to some of these companies, but when you want to make money from the hardware, you don't want to give your secret sauce to everybody. That's why Apple will never license iOS. But maybe GOOG could have skipped the phone and just tried to license a phone OS. Maybe that could have worked, though phone makers up to that point hadn't shown too much interest in licensing other people's OSes. And if you sell it to them, you can't price it too high or they'll go in-house, and you always have to worry that someone else will try to undercut you with a cheaper OS (windows for phones, etc) and that your phonemakers will jump ship, etc. 4) I think Google looked at that kind of business and they decided they'd rather go for maximum scale instead. When you give a quality OS for free, you know you'll get the maximum number of partners possible because you can't be undercut on price and they won't feel you are competing with them, they're partners and if they do well, you do well. I'm sure Google decided that what was most valuable was to have hundreds of millions of devices with a button on the front that took you to search and/or a prominent search bar on the home screen. The only thing more valuable than a search ad is a geo-targeted search ad... and this way they have a lot of influence over how the mobile platform develops and what users expect from phones. Otherwise we might have gotten phones that go "oops, sorry, Microsoft paid us so this phone can only search the web with Bing!" or "sorry, web apps don't work on this phone, only paid downloaded apps work" or whatever BS like that. And trust me, more of that stuff would be plausible if Google was a phonemakers and other phonemakers felt directly in competition with them. 5) So I say without hesitation that Apple is the king of smartphones and tablets. But Android is a solid #2 that might not have happened if Google had taken another strategy, and while I think Apple is a better business right now, I agree with Buffett and Munger that Google has a great moat, and I think that their 'infrastructure' play is stable over the long term. Apple is kind of on a product treadmill, and they need to keep producing great products that people want (they also have some nice infrastructure stuff like iTunes and the App Store, but it's a much smaller part of their business). Meanwhile, Google benefits (via search, adsense or display ads) from every Android, iPhone, RIM, Nokia, Windows phone, iPad, etc... So I wouldn't have any problems investing in AAPL, and I think those here who invested in MSFT probably will also do well over the long term, but GOOG at $482 fit my personal criteria better, so I got in. Update: I also forgot to mention that if Google hadn't made Android free, chances are they couldn't have used the Linux foundation because of the GPL license (though I'm not 100% sure, maybe there's a workaround), so it would have been a lot more work to build the OS from scratch rather than on top of an existing foundation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest VAL9000 Posted July 8, 2011 Share Posted July 8, 2011 This is troubling for the whole free thing: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/070711-oracle-win-would-strain-android.html Oracle is reportedly already asking handset makers to pay as much as $20 per Android phone That's a high-ball number, but $20-30 per device is realistic when you include MSFT's licensing agreements. Google's model, as Liberty outlined, shouldn't be impacted by this all that much. What Google will need to do is ensure that their future applications (such as Google Wallet) can run on any mobile OS, and not just Android. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted July 8, 2011 Author Share Posted July 8, 2011 Oracle is indeed a bit scary, because as a company they are like 85% legal department, 15% engineering... (there's a good joke about that here: http://goo.gl/FbZTV ) (For those not familiar with this, see what I posted previously about patent trolling: http://blogs.forbes.com/timothylee/2011/07/07/microsofts-android-shakedown/ And some discussion of the article at a site full of programmers (it's where I found the link): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738628 ) We'll see how it plays out. Google and the handset makers aren't exactly penniless startups, so they should be able to mount a pretty good legal defense. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted July 8, 2011 Author Share Posted July 8, 2011 http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/07/08/googles-deal-making-math/?hp Eric Schmidt on Google's acquisition strategy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted July 10, 2011 Author Share Posted July 10, 2011 Another reason why I'm not too worried about Bing and Yahoo (Bingoo?) is that I have access to very detailed stats from a site that has received about 500 million pageviews in the past few years. This is a site that has pretty mainstream content for mainstream users, nothing specific about the content should favor one search engine over the other. Its readers should be a representative cross-section of the english-reading internet public (which actually should favor Bing because they are more US-centric than Google so far, afaik). Looking at the stats for about the past year and a half, that site is getting about as much traffic from Google Australia as from Yahoo Search, and Google UK and Google Canada are both ahead of Bing as referrers. Google.com is 12.5 times bigger than Bing, but that's just the .com, that doesn't count the 50+ other country-specific Google sites... If you put all the Google sites together, it totally dwarfs Bing and everything else. I also have access to stats from other very popular sites (millions and millions of pageviews per month) and on some of them both Bing and Yahoo do better than on that first site, but never that great. That's partly why I'm skeptical when I see the market research companies putting Google at 65% or whatever. What matters to sell search ads is having users that actually search for something. I feel like the market research firms probably overcount people making typos in the address bar of IE and getting taken to Bing or users that type things like "facebook" in a search engine every day because bookmarks and URLs are over their heads, or maybe they have some other form of sample bias (for example, the use of tracking toolbars poses various problems...). That's why I like to look directly at actual stats from popular sites, because it shows what people who actually were looking for something and got somewhere used. So don't take this as gospel, and I realize my sample size isn't huge and could be biased, but I like having those data points. Fun trivia: On the site I'm looking at, Google Mauritius drives more traffic than Altavista (they still exist!)... and Google Malaysia drives slightly more traffic than AOL search. Update: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/antitrust-officials-probing-sale-of-patents-to-googles-rivals/2011/07/08/gIQANSlZ4H_story.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S2S Posted July 10, 2011 Share Posted July 10, 2011 How Google lost the the Nortel patent purse - TechCrunch's analysis (side comment: as a Bond fan, I enjoy the various references, including the url) http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/09/vesper/ The Canadian court paper: http://documentcentre.eycan.com/eycm_library/Project%20Copperhead/English/Monitor's%20Reports/Seventy-FirstReportoftheMonitor.pdf Google's amusing (if backfiring) bidding tactic: http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/02/3-point-14159265/ following their initial “stalking horse” bid to get the ball rolling, Google put forth bids of $1,902,160,540, $2,614,972,128 — and $3.14159 billion. If those numbers look familiar, it’s because you’re a nerd. Brun’s constant, Meissel-Mertens constant, and yes, Pi. That’s how Google was bidding on perhaps the most important auction they’ve ever been involved in. Not surprisingly, those on the other end of the auction had no clue what Google was doing. And found their behavior erratic and odd. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted July 10, 2011 Author Share Posted July 10, 2011 Google's amusing (if backfiring) bidding tactic: http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/02/3-point-14159265/ following their initial “stalking horse” bid to get the ball rolling, Google put forth bids of $1,902,160,540, $2,614,972,128 — and $3.14159 billion. If those numbers look familiar, it’s because you’re a nerd. Brun’s constant, Meissel-Mertens constant, and yes, Pi. That’s how Google was bidding on perhaps the most important auction they’ve ever been involved in. Not surprisingly, those on the other end of the auction had no clue what Google was doing. And found their behavior erratic and odd. They did the same thing at their IPO and at least one more time (and I think they probably just do it for fun, but it's great for keeping the brand appealing to engineers, showing that even at the highest levels they have technical people with a sense of humor and they're not just another boring old bureaucratic business). I don't think it backfired, they lost because the others got together and bid more, not because they had round numbers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted July 11, 2011 Author Share Posted July 11, 2011 Looks like the big damage numbers that Oracle is asking for are resting on pretty shaky legal foundations and might not hold for very long: http://www.pcworld.com/article/235076/google_disputes_damages_estimate_in_oracle_case.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moore_capital54 Posted July 12, 2011 Share Posted July 12, 2011 GOOGLE+ PASSES 10M USERS! https://plus.google.com/117388252776312694644/posts/bGJPTALDkDe This is going to be great, as I previously said, Google is where web traffic originates. I bet they surpass Facebook in less than 3 years. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted July 12, 2011 Author Share Posted July 12, 2011 GOOGLE+ PASSES 10M USERS! https://plus.google.com/117388252776312694644/posts/bGJPTALDkDe This is going to be great, as I previously said, Google is where web traffic originates. I bet they surpass Facebook in less than 3 years. This is a non-official estimate, though a pretty sophisticated one. Regardless of how many users they have exactly, it seems to be growing fast despite it being just a field-trial. What impresses me more (I have a Google+ account) is the engagement. Lots of great content, lots and lots of comments, many people writing about how they love it and are spending lots of time on it every day and spending all day in hangouts and such. That's a good sign, especially for a beta product that will get more refine and get new features over the next few months. It's also very effective to get G+ notifications anywhere on Google sites (search, news, finance, gmail, maps, etc). It'll make it very sticky. The way I see it, for G+ to be successful, it doesn't have to overtake Facebook. If it does over time, that's a homerun, but even without that, it could help make Google products better (search and ads especially) and more valuable. The asymmetric follow model mean it could replace Twitter. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest valueInv Posted July 12, 2011 Share Posted July 12, 2011 Looks like the big damage numbers that Oracle is asking for are resting on pretty shaky legal foundations and might not hold for very long: http://www.pcworld.com/article/235076/google_disputes_damages_estimate_in_oracle_case.html Up again, down again: http://www.itworld.com/software/182381/judge-its-possible-google-knew-java-violation Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted July 13, 2011 Author Share Posted July 13, 2011 It looks like Oracle might be in trouble, IBM has patented patent-trolling ;) http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220070244837%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20070244837&RS=DN/20070244837 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest valueInv Posted July 13, 2011 Share Posted July 13, 2011 It looks like Oracle might be in trouble, IBM has patented patent-trolling ;) http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220070244837%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20070244837&RS=DN/20070244837 Won't withstand a patent review, too much prior art ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted July 13, 2011 Author Share Posted July 13, 2011 It looks like Oracle might be in trouble, IBM has patented patent-trolling ;) http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220070244837%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20070244837&RS=DN/20070244837 Won't withstand a patent review, too much prior art ;) Considering the kind of trivial and obvious stuff that they award as software patents by the truckload, I wouldn't be surprised if it passed... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted July 14, 2011 Author Share Posted July 14, 2011 Q2: http://investor.google.com/earnings/2011/Q2_google_earnings.html up 12.29% after hours right now.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted July 14, 2011 Author Share Posted July 14, 2011 Larry Page just said that over 10 million people are on G+, and they've had more than 1 billion items shared in a single day. Android now at 550k activations a day. 135 million Android devices in the wild, up from 100 million 3 months ago. Chrome at 160 million users. Last year it was 80 million. 3 billion video views per day on youtube. Live streaming of royal wedding was 100 million views. Great potential for video ads, which are higher CPM. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted July 15, 2011 Author Share Posted July 15, 2011 Small launch, but it will plug into social and could make google news more sticky and valuable than it already is: http://www.google.com/support/News/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1237021 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted July 17, 2011 Author Share Posted July 17, 2011 If you are really curious about Google's back story, I recommend the books about it, but if you just want a quick overview, this Bloomberg short documentary provides the 101: http://www.bloomberg.com/video/66114966/ Bonus: Larry Page's commencement speech at U of Michigan: Larry Page's stake in GOOG now worth over 16 billion: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-15/google-ceo-page-adds-about-1-9-billion-in-personal-wealth-after-earnings.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted July 17, 2011 Author Share Posted July 17, 2011 For members of the VIC, here's a recent writeup about GOOG: http://www.valueinvestorsclub.com/value2/Idea/ViewIdea/51451 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matjone Posted July 23, 2011 Share Posted July 23, 2011 Question for anyone who keeps tabs on this stuff - what if Apple started putting Bing as the default search on all their devices? Not saying they would ever do this just trying to come up with ways that google's search dominance could be challenged. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest valueInv Posted July 23, 2011 Share Posted July 23, 2011 Question for anyone who keeps tabs on this stuff - what if Apple started putting Bing as the default search on all their devices? Not saying they would ever do this just trying to come up with ways that google's search dominance could be challenged. Bing has already been slowly nipping away at Google's marketshare. If Apple makes the change, then Bing gets critical mass and the scale to create some big problems for Google. It's been a big question in my mind why Apple has not already done this. I am guessing it's probably a contract issue. They've apparently swapped out Google maps already. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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