Their stock price reflects their ad moat, and nothing more.
In my opinion, their stock price is the least interesting. They are coming around on the other side of an upswing and seem poised to be headed back down towards their pre-COVID normalization of around 90 dollars. Compared to Amazon, it's disappointing, and Microsoft is in another galaxy in comarison. With no real option for growth, considering they simply cannot be trusted to launch a new product, it seems like the early feedback is this will also hurt their cloud business as customers simply cannot trust them to maintain new offerings.
They'll do what they always have done: survive off ads and YouTube. But I am not sure how many more percentage points they can squeeze out of those two. People are already starting to catch whiff that their search engine results are not what they used to be. What will happen then?
If history is doomed to repeat itself, they'll do what their predecessors have done: get some Harvard-style MBA types in the building to "optimize", jettison all the excess baggage, and keep the cash flowing into their investors pockets, while they slowly lose whats left of their reputation and ability to innovate.
I suppose they have enough patents to troll on for the next 25+ years or so. Just like some other 3 letter company we may know about that once was a tech giant.
We're not talking about profit (which is dictated by depreciation of capital intensive investments), we're talking about adoption the service. GCP is alive and well.
Adoption has never paid a bill, anyone can sell a bunch of dollars for 95 cents and you can’t just hand wave away depreciation, servers have to be replaced, they aren’t just keeping the same servers online forever.
I remember reading about dream workplace called Google where devs can join or leave any team for credits to count towards promotions, with a catch that helping others and/or bothering yourself with low-impact maintenance tasks could risk your employment.
If that's actually how Google works, it does sound structural.
Sure, if you want to fade into history as an ultimately irrelevant ad network that simply had the novel ideal of tying ads into internet search early on in the internet’s youth and became popular and rich for a decade, then take this stance.
> Sure, if you want to fade into history as an ultimately irrelevant ad network that simply had the novel ideal of tying ads into internet search early on in the internet’s youth and became popular and rich for a decade, then take this stance.
The problem with any current leader is that they do want to do this. Or, rather, they don't care if they do. Who cares what Google will look like in the long run? They'll be gone. Right now, they presided over the appearance of continued growth, and that's what matters.
(I have no internal knowledge about Google, of course, but I am at a university, whose plan is (1) attract more students, (2) more students, (3) more, (4) start thinking about what to do with all these students.)
Founder run companies care and even hand picked successors to founders who are “company men”. The Google CEO is just a suit.
If you look at all of the Big Tech companies - Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, (yes I left off Netflix, it’s a nothingburger compared to those five), Google is the only one that seems to be rudderless without a long term plan or vision.
Im not saying that is what they want, but it looks like what is happening to me. Ads was not new, it was selling internet search ads on a open auction that was novel.
There stock price would say otherwise: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/?guccounter=1
Until people stop using their service(s) then, no, their brand is not dying.