| I’m not sure what less than one percent difference from the S&P 500 is supposed to prove good or bad. The S&P 500 is heavily weighted toward Alphabet, it literally is a big part of the S&P 500 itself. And, you know, Exxon Mobil hasn’t really made a new product in quite some time but they’re doing just fine. Still, I’d say that Google has had plenty of new products and bets that it has been making, along with great recent performance in many ways. They’re finally hitting their stride with consumer hardware, with the FitBit acquisition clearly boosting their wearables business and selling a lot more pixel watches than any previous smartwatch effort. Similarly, Pixel phones themselves have jumped from around 4% marketshare to 8-12% marketshare in the US just this year. Success in that arena is very new to Google, so I would call that a long term investment that is paying off. Google is investing in custom Tensor processors which is also a recent product launch for them, starting in 2020. Stadia was a new product that obviously failed in the end but did represent a decent technical achievement and major bet on a new product. YouTube TV isn’t that old, either, it launched 2017, and being the top subscribed digital cable product is a big achievement. The elephant in the room for newest major product launch is Bard AI and Gemini. It’s fair to say AI is less than proven and that these may be copycat products, but it’s also true that it’s going to be an area where your big competitors are basically Microsoft, Apple, and Google with little room for anyone else. And let’s not forget that large companies can boost their value proposition and mitigate competitive threats through acquisitions. Even IBM’s lost decade was overcome, and a lot of it was through acquisitions and business unit spinoffs and closures that helped modernize their offerings (companies like Red Hat and Hashicorp). |