Groundhog Day: Will Larry and Sergey see Their Shadow??

By Kyle Austin

By Kyle Austin

So Punxsutawney Phil won’t be looking for his shadow until Saturday but for Larry, Sergey and the rest of NASDAQ -Groundhog’s Day is today.   Today at 4:30 p.m ET Google will release its Q4 earnings and if you’ve been following any of the lead-up stories to this “event,” it would seem that the entire hopes of the technology sector loom in the balance. 

If Sergey and Larry appear out of their Mountain View bunker (for their earnings call) and see their shadow (anything less then blowout earnings) we are certainly headed towards six more weeks of winter and more importantly into a bear market which signifies a near full-on technology industry recession.  At least that’s how the scribes are spinning it.  

In his “Big Tech” blog, Fortune’s Jon Fortt takes a look at how important Google’s results will be to the entire tech industry in a post titled “What if Google Misses?”  In the post Fortt points out that:  

“Anything short of blowout earnings from Google and steady confidence from executives could rattle not only Google but also the whole Internet sector — though Yahoo (YHOO) has already done its part to put folks on edge.” 

However, Wendy Tanaka at Forbes is bullish on Google.  She writes that Google is expected to announce “40% increase in net income and a 54% jump in revenues for the fourth quarter.”  She also spins Yahoo!’s results in a slightly more positive tone: 

“Yahoo! finally had something to “yahoo” about on Tuesday as it reported fourth-quarter earnings that beat analysts by $0.04 cents per share. The struggling Internet giant reported earnings of $0.15 per share, compared to estimates of $0.11.” 

Liz Gunnison at Portfolio teases that we could learn a lot more about Google’s mobile strategy in addition to their fiscal numbers in today’s call.  

Even if Sergey and Larry see their shadows today they will have 16 more years to try their luck again according to what they said in an interview with Adam Lashinsky of Fortune.  

In a rare three-way interview (That CEO guy named Eric Schmidt joined them as well), the Google boys at the top told Lashinsky that they all pledged to stay with the company for 20 years in July of 2004 before their IPO.

Will year five start out on a positive note? Stay tuned.

1 comment January 31st, 2008

Can the Internet Really Go Down — Everywhere?

By George Snell

By George

Apparently yes.

The vulnerability is scary. According to CNN.com, an anchor from a ship may have severed an undersea cable in the Mediterranean Sea and taken out Internet service in large regions of the Middle East and Asia (including China and India).

With so much information and critical services now Web-based – the cost of this outage will be in the billions. The United States has been spared from the outage (although the Web was in slow motion most of the morning).

But U.S. business have off-shored so much technical and customer support overseas that companies like IBM and Intel are still assessing the damage to their operations. It probably won’t be pretty.

Stay tuned to this story because it has greater ramifications than just the business losses and downtime. Government and business these days can barely function without the Internet (I think of our own operations at Racepoint Group – with a lot of our tools and many of our databases Web-based).

If an anchor can wipe out the Internet on two continents – the discussion falling out of this disaster will be centered on what will need to be done to fully protect and deliver the Web – while having reliable back up solutions in place.

Add comment January 31st, 2008