Google's unorthodox press release raises questions | Hacker News Reader

Google's unorthodox press release raises questions

theglobeandmail.com

30 pointsMikeCapone21 comments

"However, some worry that this trend may harm individual and less-sophisticated investors who cannot access the blogs and websites as quickly as professionals. Others worry that not everyone will get the information."

Putting the stuff on a public website with a simple url makes it HARDER for non-professionals to access? Someone clue me in to their reasoning as to why.

Maybe these non-professionals are getting their information from portals that only show press releases and MSM stories.

Well that an the fact that if you're an analyst covering 100 stocks you now are responsible for monitoring 100 different sources!

They weren't responsible for monitoring 100 different sources before?

There is still the same number of things for them to track. They just have to track them in a different place.

I think it would be fun to see the SEC require a specific URL for the location of investment information. Or create a simple API to be followed.

market opportunity

You can flip to Bloomberg in two years if you're good.

Almost as funny was this line: "The statement posed a brief obstacle for the media, analysts and others hungry for Google’s numbers."

Yes, a hyperlink is a "brief obstacle". You'd have thought financial analysts would have learned how to use a computer by 2010.

This statement was made by a PR dissemination company who's now facing the prospect of losing business.

If receiving investment information via blog is a problem for you, maybe you shouldn't be inventing in google. As Warren Buffett says: invest in what you know.

Warren Buffet is a full time investor, so that's a viable strategy for him. For most people "invest in what you know" is equivalent to "invest in the industry you work in" which is a bad strategy. Much better is to invest in low-cost index funds, a strategy that could be summed up as "don't know what you're investing in."

"Google's unorthodox press release raises questions"

Newspapers afraid of change, read all about it.

Why is it Google's responsibility to keep PR news wires in business?

Maybe Google did it to know who is reading their quarterly results, what portion they read exactly and what they do with the information.

They would have no way of knowing that if they just send it out as an press release.

I hate PR newswires with a passion. Die. Die. Die.

+1. Most of them have a rather hazy idea of what they are doing and are stuck in the last century technology-wise. Example: at least one wire releases time-critical information in HTML with multimegabyte (yes, megabyte) stylesheets which are delivered inline. And they won't change the format.

What on earth goes into a stylesheet to make it that big? Are they bundling an entire media package, complete with high-res images as data: URIs?

That would actually make some twisted kind of sense, I guess. These guys are using an HTML generator that produces things like this:

.g { MARGIN: 72pt 90pt; size: 595.3pt 841.9pt }

P.a { FONT-SIZE: 10pt; MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; FONT-FAMILY: "Arial","sans-serif"; LETTER-SPACING: 0.5pt }

TABLE.t { BORDER-RIGHT: medium none; BORDER-TOP: medium none; MARGIN-LEFT: -5.4pt; BORDER-LEFT: medium none; BORDER-BOTTOM: medium none; BORDER-COLLAPSE: collapse }

... oodles of it.

It sure was a great way to attact investitors to Google's site. More of a way to market a google product (http://investor.google.com/), than anything else. Conventional media may not like it, but that is understandable, as the product marketed by google competes with such conventional media (without charging for it).

It's not a Google "product", just a site. It's "Google Investor Relations".

So now the wires stop charging for distribution and start charging for syndication... simples.

using their buying power to break monopolies of useless companies. Nice.

Wish i had the power to do this to my ISP.

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