In a nutshell, Google is fine, thanks. Last quarterly earning showed a revenue of $5.2bn for the first three months of 2008, a 42% increase compared to a year ago. And the operating income is cruising at $1.55bn, or 30% of the revenue. Going deeper into the financial statements give some clues about Google’s strategy for the coming years. In one word : dominance will be secured through a control of the physical internet, i.e. servers and networks. Expenditures for the period amounted to $842m, a jump of 41% versus Q1 2007. Altogether, Google has invested $5.14bn in datacenters since 2006. A level that no operator can match. Not Microsoft, not IBM, not HP. That gigantic infrastructure will allow Google, not only to serve any advertising to any customer, but also to develop and host new applications, most of them having yet to be invented.
Related columns:
- Google — Indexing the physical world TweetThe US Patent Office is a gold mine for journalists and industry watchers. From sketches on a possible new Macintosh (the first one being a small notebook sliding inside a vertical docking station) to hints on future Google plans, there is always something to eat. The website Search Engine Land has found three new patents [...]...
- Google owns 69% of the internet advertising TweetHere is why Google was so eager to buy the ad-server company DoubleClick : their combined market share reaches 69% of unique visitors, according to Attributor, a start-up specialized in tracking monetization on the web (January numbers). The split gives 35% for Google itself and 34% for DoubleClick. And, if we measure by domains (instead [...]...
- TV on Internet Protocol: Advertisers Salivate TweetHere’s the BFD: TV programs come as IP packets, just like any other Internet content. The results? Advertisers target me with unprecedented precision, TV finally becomes interactive, huge profits on the horizon. Is this another Web 3.0 pitch? No, your honor, let me explain. For this I start with a small epiphany. Two years ago, [...]...
- From superblog to “Internet newspaper”, the lessons of the Huffington Post TweetWhat’s so special about the Huffington Post? How come that what started as a political blog three years ago now epitomizes the “superblogs” threat to mainstream media? And, perhaps more important, what causes a blog to mutate into something now perceived as a mainstream media — and do the economics work? . From a content [...]...
- Learning from the Obama Internet machine TweetFrom the very beginning, the Obama campaign met the standards of modern entrepreneurship: a clear goal (get to the White House), a strong leader (Barack), a simple pitch (Change) — and it needed cash, lots of it. And, unlike the Iraq war, it had a preset deadline, the close of business Tuesday November 4th. Not [...]...
