[Kerrigan]

The Wall Street Journal carried a good article today about how Google's upcoming massive $4billion offering of stock is pointing towards a Google "bubble" which the owners expect to burst in due time.

Apparently, when Google's lawyers presented the $4bn deal to the SEC, the reason they gave for raising such a huge amount of capital was because they think the stock still has more potential and they want to cash in. They specifically said to the SEC that they have no plans to spend the money on any acquisitions or future product development.

This isn't Steve Jobs denying something at a keynote, this is Google telling the government that they have no plans to spend this capital in the future. That basically rules out any of these ideas that Google is developing a nationwide wireless network or something else incredibly ambitious like an operating system.

Also, the founders of Google have already sold, or have planned to sell, hundreds of millions of dollars of their own stock. So apparently Google right now is raising loads of cash just for the sake of driving the stock price up.

Does anyone else concur that Google is going to become a burst bubble in the couple of years?

[The article was in the print edition of WSJ not online, so I cannot provide a link]

[baw]

Some dude was on the radio the other day talking about Google and how their shares could go as high as $800 per share. I thought he was crazy.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by baw

Some dude was on the radio the other day talking about Google and how their shares could go as high as $800 per share. I thought he was crazy.

Oh, most definitely

A couple of years from now, Google is gonna find itself in the same situation as M$ today: Being the market leader, but losing out on innovation.

-t

[TETENAL]

They have an innovative talk service out now.

[Kerrigan]

I think that outside of the search industry and advertisement market, Google has no innovative capacities. I hate to keep knocking Google, because their online & desktop search services are nothing short of excellent, but their other services are not innovative.

GMail, Google Earth, Picassa, Blogger, and now GTalk, all nice but they are not improvements on existing services. Some of their apps even have a sort of "shareware" feel, especially Picassa which to me seems to do nothing else but display photos (iPhoto for instance is more useful with its integrated services that let you order prints online and such).

[CharlesS]

GMail is not an improvement on existing free webmail services like Hotmail or Yahoo Mail? Um, let's see...

1. When it came out, it offered 1 GB of storage space. What did Hotmail offer at the time, 25 MB or something? And now GMail gives you some obscene storage size like 2500 MB that they seem to keep on increasing.

Hell, I just logged into my rarely-used Hotmail account and it still only has 25 MB. So GMail has literally over 100 times the storage space right now.

2. GMail lets you access your mail via POP for free, so you can use Mail, Thunderbird, Eudora, etc. Hotmail and Yahoo don't.

3. At the time GMail came out, Hotmail was just incredibly, unusably slow. It seems to be better nowadays, but GMail is always nice and fast.

4. GMail's interface is clean and simple. Not ugly like Hotmail.

5. GMail also doesn't seem to get bucketloads of spam right out of the box like Hotmail.

Other innovative software by Google: Google Maps

That app kicks so much ass compared to Mapquest that it's amazing. I love Google Maps.

[Kerrigan]

GMail is (was) hype. Who has 1GB worth of email? Nobody that I know.

Also, nothing is free. The ability to use your own client means that you have to let Google sift through your messages and target ads at you. Some people are fine with that, but a lot of people aren't. The only thing innovative about this is that it lets advertisers get an even closer idea of what you want. There is nothing innovative that is offered to the customer.

If you actually anticipate having 50,000,000 non-spam emails and you need somewhere to store it all, then your options are to either get GMail and let them collect keywords and sell them to advertisers, or you can pay the $5/year to Yahoo and get the same amount of storage as GMail. You pay for it either way.

[legacyb4]

Provided Google can address everyone's paranoia about privacy, they very likely have the next best thing as far as a software suite goes since they are cross-platform and accessible anywhere you can get Net access.

What remains to be seen is how much more tightly they can integrate all the services that they offer.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Kerrigan

GMail is (was) hype. Who has 1GB worth of email? Nobody that I know.

My Mail folder is 2.95 GB in size. Granted, that's locally on my hard disk, but still.

[Kerrigan]

Hey, it looks like I was right about this nearly half a year ago.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by Kerrigan

Hey, it looks like I was right about this nearly half a year ago.

[Kerrigan]

Actually I guess I wasn't right about this, but the WSJ was.

Guys, this is another reason why you should read the WSJ.

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by turtle777

Oh, most definitely

A couple of years from now, Google is gonna find itself in the same situation as M$ today: Being the market leader, but losing out on innovation.

-t

The difference is, MS was NEVER innovative. Google is. So that would be a hard call.

[Kodachrome]

Gooogle is a classic ponzi scheme....

Google's advertising model is HIGHLY biased towards making webmasters cheat just to survive...
I think Google has its plan laid out just so that you DO have to cheat to continue the Google ponzi scheme.

I'll be VERY happy when there is a non-commericial open source search engine that is completely free of advertising.

[CharlesS]

^ And how, exactly, should such a search engine pay for its server bills?

[Rolling Bones]

Could never figure out why people invest in virtual stuffs?

Google stocks are going down. Plummet ahead!

[Super Mario]

Originally Posted by Kevin

The difference is, MS was NEVER innovative. Google is. So that would be a hard call.

Google isn't as innovative as they think. Most is hype.

For example nearly everything they offer is about other peoples or company's information. Does Google create any data worth anyone's time?

Yahoo, AOL and MSN etc they create data/information/services. They offer search and messaging services but also write news articles and have category listings. They create directories and communities. Google doesn't create much - it mostly takes from everyone else.

Now I read Google wants to make an operating system. It is a Googled version of Linux and KDE. Again they are using other people's work and data to glorify themselves. They did nothing compared to other big companies with the same hype.

Their click ads are the only reason they are so rich. How long will that last when one day click ads might be seen as a big hype that never really paid off for most companies?

[SirCastor]

Originally Posted by Super Mario

Google isn't as innovative as they think. Most is hype.

For example nearly everything they offer is about other peoples or company's information. Does Google create any data worth anyone's time?

Yahoo, AOL and MSN etc they create data/information/services. They offer search and messaging services but also write news articles and have category listings. They create directories and communities. Google doesn't create much - it mostly takes from everyone else.

Now I read Google wants to make an operating system. It is a Googled version of Linux and KDE. Again they are using other people's work and data to glorify themselves. They did nothing compared to other big companies with the same hype.

Their click ads are the only reason they are so rich. How long will that last when one day click ads might be seen as a big hype that never really paid off for most companies?

The trick is google seems to be doing things on the side of the consumer. Googles ads are completely non-invasive. So was their search engine. Simple, easy on the eye. The projects they do don't overwhelm the user.

One thing I see google doing potentially, if they do end up producing this OS, is making something competitive with OS X, in terms of ease of use. I can see Google producing something that thus-far only Apple has accomplished: A Powerful, yet easy to use Unix system. I hope they do. There's also the potential of moving from the current Computer paradigm which has you and your computer connect to the internet. In a somewhat distant future, I see desktop machines being more dependant on the network. There are of course positives and negatives, but Google is a company that has it's roots in the network, rather than on the desktop, and they have a bit more lead-in to do it.

[PurpleGiant]

Originally Posted by Rolling Bones

Could never figure out why people invest in virtual stuffs?

I have said this before, Google is not a 'virtual' company. It is a real company, with a sound business model in advertising. It isn't going anywhere.

[Kerrigan]

That doesn't mean that their company's value won't deflate dramatically. If you go up and skim through the OP you will see how Google has been inflating its stock price, with nothing substantial to back it up.

[torsoboy]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

GMail is not an improvement on existing free webmail services like Hotmail or Yahoo Mail? Um, let's see...

3. At the time GMail came out, Hotmail was just incredibly, unusably slow. It seems to be better nowadays, but GMail is always nice and fast.

4. GMail's interface is clean and simple. Not ugly like Hotmail.

5. GMail also doesn't seem to get bucketloads of spam right out of the box like Hotmail.

Other innovative software by Google: Google Maps

That app kicks so much ass compared to Mapquest that it's amazing. I love Google Maps.

I hated gmail when i first got an account... that dang "Loading" screen bugs the heck out of me. It takes me longer to get into gmail than my other mail clients.

I HATE the interface. I don't think it is clean... just boring.

Hotmail does not give you spam. You give that to yourself by giving out your email address to every site you see.

Google maps does rock. I use it to map out lots of stuff... it ROCKS!

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by torsoboy

Hotmail does not give you spam. You give that to yourself by giving out your email address to every site you see.

I once set up a Hotmail account and I didn't even ever use it except for one week to communicate with family when I was away somewhere and didn't have a webmail account at the time. The thing instantly got spam, even though I didn't post it anywhere. And my username was not guessable, either...

[sfd]

Originally Posted by PurpleGiant

I have said this before, Google is not a 'virtual' company. It is a real company, with a sound business model in advertising. It isn't going anywhere.

For a company with such a sound business model the management are sure selling their stock quickly. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=GOOG

Insider transactions total 9,339,990 over the last 3 months at say an average price of $350. So google exec's have sold over the last 3 months around 40 Billion USD or 25% of its market capitalisation.

For a company with such huge growth potential you have to wonder why its execs are selling their shares like there was no tomorrow. I think you will find that they know their bubble has burst and they are just waiting for the market to realise it.

--
Chris

[turtle777]

Chris, I agree, something just ain't right with Google...