A Bad Quarter for Google (Kinda Sorta)
I wouldn't mind having the
bad
quarter Google just posted. The search engine king reported earnings of
nearly a billion dollars on sales of nearly $4 billion -- a neat little 25 percent
margin. Meanwhile, revenue was up almost 60 percent compared to the previous
year's quarter.
So Wall Street geniuses drove the stock price up, right? Not on your life.
The Street was looking for more and slapped Google upside the head by driving
the share price down 8 percent in one day.
Meanwhile, Google exec Eric Schmidt is talking cautiously about the future,
indicating that the company will slow down its hiring (is that why it hasn't
returned my calls?).
Microsoft's
results, to my mind, were also superb. It has more than three times the
profits of Google (MS had $3 billion) and over three times its revenues (MS
had over $13 billion). But as an older and larger company, Redmond's growth
rates failed to compare to Google's.
Posted by Doug Barney on July 23, 2007