back to article Google faces post-Fleetwood Mac comedown

America loves its ballin'. Walk into the shop, ice around your neck, and twist off a hand full of cabbage to buy things - not out of necessity, but out of the joy of buying things. You would think that a publicly-traded company that's rolling in cheddar would be able to exercise some self-restraint, especially a company …

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  1. Frank Bough
    Thumb Down

    Two Word Review

    Shit sandwich.

  2. nicholas22
    Happy

    Yup

    Nice article. But I think they do this to swing their dicks around... :D

  3. Juan
    Black Helicopters

    nice, but...

    ...retrospect is a bitch.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    WTF?

    OK Ted, what the hell was that? It was boring! Make with the profanities already, surely there are other minorities just begging to get the piss taken out of them. So Google spends money on food, big fucking deal. I can only surmise that you had too many lagers and curries, or whatever the hell you Yanks eat, and this pathetic tripe is about the only publishable thing your brain was able to come up with. Please, no more of this.

  5. Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse
    Flame

    Yeah, yeah, yeah....

    I get the bits about how many malaria innoculations £X could buy and how many poor kids could be educated etc.. but lets face it, unfortunately the world of business isn't like that is it.

    UK PLC could certainly manufacture more; and build more hospitals and schools if only it didn't spend £37 billion a year on protecting its borders from unarmed brown people... BP could certainly put a lot more of their profits into the delta areas of Nigeria and South America to help fund health and eduction projects to the benefit of the people who's resources they have raped. But hey, those actions would piss off the city right?

    I get that bit. But I don't get why the author is so down on Google.

    They've earned the money. They can spend it on what they want, when they want. Even if it does mean a loss. My guess is that the author is one of these kids who, and I quote...

    "suffered through more than a decade of collegiate education, partly out of fear of entering the real world, and partly because you'd never heard the word "overqualified" before, so when you landed that job as a Software Engineer in Mountain View, dammit, you were entitled to some free shit."

    Except that you didn't land the job. In fact when you went to the interview you found out that you didn't have the talent to survive there. As a result of that you became bitter and decided to pass yourself off as a journalist instead and fire bullets at them from the comfort of whatever gutter you find yourself in.

    Either that, or out of greed you placed all your eggs in one Google sized basket of stocks and only now are realising that what goes up, must come down.

    Move on. There are more interesting articles to read on El Reg.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "ice around your neck, and twist off a hand full of cabbage"

    These appear to be fully formed words of English, arrayed with correct syntactic and grammatical construction, but I find myself unable to extract any meaning from them whatsoever. Could I possibly ask that a commenter more fluent in Transatlantic dotcom slang or whatever variety of gibberish this represents provides some enfuckinglightenment?

  7. amanfromMars Silver badge

    Only in America? ...... Failure Pays Big Time ....

    ... for a Catastrophic Black Hole in Recession for Depression.

    And Google's abiding vulnerability/opportunity? It is easily groomed with the deliberate placement of sensitive information on the Web for IT Networks InterNetworking to "Discover"...... making it, its own worst enemy at maintaining private security for secret projects.

    And that is an inherent systemic fault/facility in its Core Base Algorithm and RSS Feeds/Cookie Feasts.

    With any Additional Sense, they may even realise that secret security for private projects is the answer which they can shower with gifts that will return on the Investment rather than render them for all to See, the Soft Fool for an Easy Touch.

    However, what can you expect, the company is young and bound to get ripped off by the Sharks who need its money for Nothing they are Offering.

  8. Matt Bradley
    Gates Halo

    Nice

    "Oh, and in case you were wondering, twelve million dollars is enough to buy forty eight million doses of a drug to treat malaria."

    Of course, it should be pointed out that Bill Gates left Microsoft first before he started campaigning for money to spend on Malaria. Perhaps we'll have to wait for Page and Brin to do the same before they start dropping the cash where it matters?

  9. Tim

    F..k me

    I've read better things in the Guardian

    Tim#3

  10. Jonny F
    Thumb Down

    El Reg Journalism Quality Control Fails!

    Was it stolen? Did the legendary El Reg Quality Control server fail?

    Did the intern press a button they shouldn't have?

    That was terrible journalism.

    I come here for infotainment, and got neither.

  11. Levente Szileszky
    Coat

    In hindsight...

    ...it's always 20/20 <yawn> - however you're taking the wannabe-analyst-journalism to an entire new level:

    "All the drugs are finally taking back what's owed to them. Sure, there's still some real talent hidden under those dark-circled eyes, but it's going to be at least a decade before we see it again. Until then, though, Google is going to be in rehab, feeling sorry for itself over all of the bad decisions its made."

    Awww...

    Aside of the dead-wrong analogy you picked - Google is nowhere as sick or having symptoms or anything like the look of a drug abuser prior to checking into rehab would be associated with - last time I have checked (~10 mins ago) Google was still raking in money and even their stock is still riding high, more than $100 higher than IPO level; and it's rising for weeks now, despite all the bad news about the world's economy...

    ... one has to wonder that what kind of prerequisites are essential for El Reg writers: being able to use a keyboard/text editor/email, browser, form grammatically proper English sentences (obviously meaningful isn't really necessarily as the "ice around your neck, and twist off a hand full of cabbage" idiocy clearly showed us), perhaps even use (gasp) Google to google-up info about Google...?

    Dunno but basic understanding of the matter at hand - the one you've decided to write about, you know - is apparently not one of them, that's for sure.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh my, oh my, oh my...

    A couple of sour grapes in the bowl today?

  13. John

    Quick, hire Ted for

    Comic Relief and Children in Need!

    Where's the Red Nose icon?

  14. amanfromMars Silver badge
    Alien

    Your wish our command/our wish your comment ..... Goggle Golden Babel Phish Rule #XXXX

    ""ice around your neck, and twist off a hand full of cabbage" ... Could I possibly ask that a commenter more fluent in Transatlantic dotcom slang or whatever variety of gibberish this represents provides some enfuckinglightenment?" ... By Anonymous Coward Posted Monday 9th February 2009 14:06 GMT

    Wearing some jewelry and paying with ready cash, AC

  15. Tim Bergel

    "ice around your neck, and twist off a hand full of cabbage"

    I second AC's post - what *does* that mean?

  16. Ian

    Oh, bits of stuff

    I've just this very day flown home from meetings in San Jose: it has to be said the traffic is very light. I measured the dot com bust by how long it took to drive from my preferred hotel by Palo Alto Caltrain and Sun up by the Dumbarton Bridge, and down in San Jose it all felt similarly screwed. Stanford Shopping Centre was empty yesterday, but there was a queue out the door at the Redwood City Fresh Choice. Google engineers may find themselves in a buyers' market.

    On the Stevie Nicks front, the only `making of' documentary worth watching is the one that FM did for their recent reformation album. There's a Google Lesson there, which is that basically nice people (as they all appear to be) can have second lives.

  17. glennog
    Coat

    @amanfromMars

    Well, I was going to say I reckon you're the first human in history to fail the Turing test, then you come out with an accurate and succinct explanation of the 'Ice/Cabbage' yankism...

    You truly are full of surprises.

    Mine's the one with :O on the back.

  18. gsl
    Alien

    Translation

    You know there's something seriously wrong with the writing when amanfrommars translates part of the article, and the translation makes sense.!

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    B+, could do better

    Thing is, can you *really* rip it out of a company for giving its employees free lunch? I mean, the way they bang on about it like this makes them the greatest company ever EVER is pretty irritating - and let's face it, about 90% of Googlers would prefer just to get paid more and have to buy their own lunch - but ultimately it keeps employees moderately happy and keeps them enduring the other cr@p for longer.

    What's been slowly dawning on me, though, is that if the 80s was about IBM, the 90s was about Microsoft, and the 00s was about Google.... who's going to take Google's crown? Because the way things are shaping up, Google has no plan b, and its frantic efforts to turn up the chocolate dial (accepting gambling, beer and finally hard liquor ads, all in contravention of their own prior commitments) only serve to highlight that. It's fantastically good at what it does, but search is getting to be old hat, and if you're the behemoth in a market, it's hard to be nimble in responding to new threats.

  20. Robert Ramsay

    EEk!

    Isn't amanfrommars translating things from the Reg into English one of the signs of the Apocalypse????

  21. psychochief
    Thumb Up

    rap talk or wat ?? :O)

    cheers amanfromMars, wazzat then rap crap or wat, youll have to excuse me im british dont ya know, toodle pip :O)

  22. Tim Parker
    Stop

    Grow up Ted

    Yeah - we get some of the points about what money can buy - and.... ? So Google

    wasted some of the money it's earned - I expect that's never happened in any other large business... So there are some financial fuck-wits with clout in the organisation.. this is news ?

    This 'article' is piss awful - just sounds like some whinging, bitter little child letting off steam to me

    Anyway - what is it with you and Google ?

  23. This post has been deleted by its author

  24. Josh Hamilton
    Alien

    Much like Vogon Poetry...

    I quite enjoyed it.

    Old Greeny because Google's continued success (amongst a history of giving away all their apps for free and not actually building anythign consumable) must surely be a premonition to our forthcoming alien overlords.

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    What Ted's not bright enough to realize

    ...is that doing what Google does on the scale that Google does it involves developing a ton of technology that he's never even heard of.

  26. Steve Dockery
    Thumb Down

    Allow Me To Translate

    Not that I think it's good writing, but I can translate the ice and cabbage line. The ice is likely diamond jewelry, and the cabbage is cash.

  27. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
    Dead Vulture

    Transatlantic dotcom translation

    Nice try on importing some new slang, but Tech has never been Gangsta. It's shocking that "amanfromMars" is making more sense.

    I believe a proper translation of this article would boil down to, "Google is childish and wasteful." We all know that, and it's only once sentence long, so Ted probably worried that some fluff was needed to get published.

  28. Andrew Gordon

    I think I need a lie down

    Did I just read that correctly, amanfrommars just translated some rather obscure phrasing into some thing rather more intelligible?

  29. Phil B

    "ice around your neck, and twist off a hand full of cabbage"

    Er, it's a sad day when amanfromMars has a better idea of what's being said than anyone else.

    Ice - think diamonds, expensive jewellery, "bling".

    Cabbage - greenbacks.

    Easy innit?

  30. James Butler
    Thumb Down

    Um

    The point is ... ? This could have been written about any large company, anywhere in the world. Is "Hang Around With Cade Metz Day" really a good idea, El Reg? It seems to be poisoning your other writers.

  31. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Stick a fork in him

    He's done. I'm beginning to think it's time to put Ted out to pasture. Increasingly inane yawn fest articles that state the blindingly obvious. That and when amanfromMars has to translate part of the article then it should be totally obvious that you've jumped the shark. So long and thanks for all the fish or in Ted speak, "yo I be outtie dawg, peace bitches. werd"

  32. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    But I still don't understand

    "ice around your neck, and twist off a hand full of cabbage"

    Wouldn't the ice melt and give you an unpleasant shock down the front of your belly?

    I would think the cabbage would start to smell if you didn't take it to the bank quickly enough.

    Well, Ted, I concur with the others - but I have to say that I got as far as the 2nd or 3rd paragraph before switching off completely - quite apart from not understanding a bl**dy word of it I just couldn't be bothered.

    Write something interesting about IT and put lots of swear words in it.

  33. Mike Powers

    @Ian

    Ian: Also, we had a retirement lunch at the Tied House the other day, and the place was DEAD at lunchtime on a Friday. Crazy.

  34. 2FishInATank
    Paris Hilton

    Eh?

    Mentions of both Stevie Nicks and drugs in an article and no-one has made any comments about taking coke anally - allegedly - to preserve vocal cords?

    *And* AMFM making sense.....

    Ok - who are you lot and what have you done with El Reg?

  35. Cal

    $72m?

    "it's been estimated that they spend roughly $72 million per year on food alone."

    sure, but how much are they paying those employees already? $72m is really a drop in the bucket vs lost lunchtime work. i bet they pay a lot on lighting too! and desks! what a waste!

  36. Neoc

    re: "Oh, and in case you were wondering, you can't serve AdSense on shareholder reports."

    One word: ePaper.

  37. amanfromMars Silver badge

    Changed days

    The future is not in search, it is in placement. Which means that the Masters of the Universe are those who provide something new to search for, which is probably something Google should be Investing in, for it can be easily tuned to provide a Continuity Stream for any Search Engine/Virtual Machinery.

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