Somewhere, Google's financial bods are playing on repeat... What do you want from me? It's not how it used to be... Google's parent Alphabet on Monday reported $162bn in revenue for its 2019 fiscal year, up 18 per year over year, and $46bn in revenue for its fourth quarter, up 17 per cent. That was less than the $163bn and $47bn Wall Street analysts on average had expected, and the disappointment showed in an after-hours stock price decline …
And to think the US Government threw a hissy fit over AT&T when it was only making $3bn annually.
Profit is an issue only if paired to some other offence; in AT&T's case it was cross-subsidising — using profit from one subsidiary to distort competition in other markets.
That said, the Wikipedia link you provide says AT&T had $3bn revenue annually "in the 1950s and 1960s". Let's take the absolute worst case and say it had that revenue in 1950. That's still 'only' $31.82bn today. So $162bn is somewhat frightening.
Has anyone else noticed that the quality of Google search results has declined a lot recently.
For example, I am looking for a very specific thing, so I will put in a word that should narrow down the search results a lot. Before, it would give me maybe 6 search results in total. Now it will either just ignore that word and give me a load of results that don't include it, or give me results with a completely different word that has a passing resemblance to it.
Also, I quite often need to search Italian stuff. In the past, I would go to google.it and give it some Italian words to search on. Now it tells me that I don't want my mind polluted by all these pesky Italians and gives me a load of English stuff that has zero relevance to what I'm looking for.
"an analyst asked whether Pichai had considered revising Alphabet's business structure to further insulate profitable Google businesses from speculative ventures like Waymo that could become a legal liability – if its robo-cars started running over pedestrians, for example."
This is the problem with massive, multination limited liability companies with multi-layered corporate structures. Individuals can only sue a loss making subsidiary with no assets when they are harmed by a company worth over $1tn. Why isn't this the story?
Thats why the world needs more laws worded like gdpr as the max fine is calculated as 4% of the turnover of the financial group that the offinding orgnasition belongs to.
Are you, despite being a small company, part of a large group?
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