Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2018 Results
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The video in question was her playing with legos, and when I disputed it asking why they blocked her... they literally just responded saying the block was valid without ever giving a reason. Like, what the heck Google you act like robots. Anyway, just cancelled my Premium services because they could never give a straight answer.
Even if you're paying for G Suite, you can't have someone under 13. There is a special, limited type of Google account for sub-13 kids: https://support.google.com/families/answer/7103338
The rule itself is transparent and clear.
Whether the rule in as the basis for the action here is not.
It clearly would generally be required (as due process) to make that clear, too, if Google was the government of the US or one of it's states, but they aren't. Absent a contractual obligation I have seen no evidence for, I don't see why they would be obligated to explain this, even if I might find it prerable if they would.
“Must”, in the post I was responding to, seems to clearly indicate otherwise.
It is possible that word was poorly chosen.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/fbi-would-rather...
> In order to ensure that such wireless collection equipment/technology continues to be available for use by the law enforcement community, the equipment/technology and any information related to its functions, operation and use shall be protected from potential compromise by precluding disclosure of this information to the public in any manner including but not limited to: press releases, in court documents, during judicial hearings, or during other public forums or proceedings.
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/com...
"If you choose to block children under 13 on your general audience site or service, you should take care to design your age screen in a manner that does not encourage children to falsify their ages to gain access to your site or service. Ask age information in a neutral manner at the point at which you invite visitors to provide personal information or to create a user ID."
I think the real reason he was spurned is that Google support isn't that effective or responsive in a lot of cases, full stop.
For example: https://sunpig.com/martin/2011/07/03/google-made-my-son-cry/
>you should take care to design your age screen in a manner that does not encourage children to falsify their ages to gain access to your site or service. Ask age information in a neutral manner at the point at which you invite visitors to provide personal information or to create a user ID
doesn't have anything to do with this. There's definitely no age screen for the kid to lie on, and it sounds like the admin doesn't even provide an age either
https://support.google.com/families/answer/7103338?hl=en
Having a Family plan for YouTube Premium (or other Google services) doesn't suddenly make it okay to use regular Google Accounts for young children. There are laws that apply here, and Google has special accounts designed to comply with those laws.
I would, a few times per year, spend $10 or $20 to promote some tweets on Twitter. At one point, I stopped being able to do that, due to some nebulous "violation" of their TOS. I've gone back and forth with them a handful of times, and they always basically say "Yep, we looked into this, and you definitely did something bad, but we won't tell you what it was or which tweet it was in." They still send me emails and other ads trying to get me to buy advertising, though. I don't really care, it is just kind of funny.
I don't know why they all are so bad at customer support.
Their service in general has gotten kind of unreliable around here the last year or so, with a handful of widespread outages, one of which lasted almost an entire day, but the customer support has never been something I've been unhappy with.
The lack of being rooted in a customer serving business then extends to other areas where you are the actual customer, like Google Apps etc, where support exists but is often sub-par.
Customer service is expensive. I've had more luck with the tech companies because at least they sometimes pretend to care whereas some of these traditional companies would rather you died in a fire than got assistance from them.
The only time I've ever really gotten good customer service was from businesses that people could decide not to deal with if they didn't like the service.
I’ve found Amazon has always been generous and easy to deal with from a customer support perspective. Apple is pretty good as well though you often have to pay for it (maybe not for web services, I only have experience with hardware and device software issues)
They'd rather lose your business, than lose money talking to you.
It happened for 2 months and the only contact I could get was an automated reply saying that me or someone in my family had done this purchase. That wasn't the case at all.
After 2 months, this 1st of the month expense disappeared on its own.
I no longer have any paid services with them because trying to get a human to respond was impossible.
- they are too big now. No one care, no one is paid to care, and no one has any incentive to change that.
- they are too big now. Tpoo many customers, with too many dumb problems. Just sorting out the real ones from just the idiots would cost too much. It's more economical to just reject in mass, and loose a few clients, when you have the monopoly.
- they are an easy legal target for huge sums of money. If they tell you why they blocked you, you can fight it in court. If they don't, you can't.
- will Porat be cutting "other bets", rumors is that other bets is in line for a big budget cuts
- Options implied vol is showing enough movement baked in that GOOG could become largest company by Market Cap if the street likes their numbers, and GOOG doesn't disappoint often
- Like Facebook the public and wallstreet have weighed in and they love money more than privacy.
- analysts are not in anyway mixed about Google's prospects
- 41 buy recommendations vs 2 hold and 0 sell
Add Revenue:
- 4Q paid clicks on Google's own sites is up 66%, seems high enough that it's not organic but more than likely increased advertising space on sites, forced youtube videos, etc
- Cost per click on Google's own sites is down 29%
Numbers:
- 4Q profit of $8.2B est $8.7B
- 4Q EPS $12.77
- 4Q expenses $31.2B up from $24.7B yoy.
- 6.85B on capex vs $3.8B yoy
- 4Q operating margin 21% down from 24% yoy.
- 4Q other bets lost $1.33 billion, don't hear much about these bets anymore but that is an outsized loss in this category.
-Again they mention Verily and Waymo in passing but no details worth mentioning.
- 4Q Add Revenue $32B
- 4Q own site revenues $27B
Misc:
- shares are down a bit, lots of volume, nothing out of ordinary, guessing its mostly covering and profit taking.
- Too bad for almost all factor models that really on trade on tech Momentum
- The company added nearly 20,000 employees over the year. * WOW, double check this, that's a large head count addition.
- can't find any Cloud break outs, I guess MSFT and AMZN are really beating them, given how much of a growth engine it is for the 2 leaders I can't see why GOOG would hid it if they were able to compete.
- No youtube breakout of revenues, Again not a bullish sign for that division, stil nothing on youtube on the call.
- EDIT on the earnings call they did talk briefly about Youtube, no real new numbers though, just their assurance that youtube is crushing it
- Porat is doing gymnastics to talk about youtube but not actually say anything about youtube. Are youtbue numbers really that bad????
- Google was the top lobby spender of 2018, not in tech but for all companies. Silicon Valley is now arguably bigger force than Wall Street on US politics.
- margins are down and spending is up, not sure if its GOOG that wants to spend to grow or its competitors that are forcing it to compete. Either way, this competition is great for tech salaries
- Employees totaled 98,771 in the quarter vs 80,110 a year ago, WOW
2013: 47,756 (too lazy to look earlier)
2014: 53,600 (+12.2% YoY)
2015: 61,814 (+15.3% YoY)
2016: 72,053 (+16.5% YoY)
2017: 80,110 (+11.1% YoY)
2018: 98,771 (+23.2% YoY)
Source: https://abc.xyz/investor/
This does not include contractor, temp, and vendors
Would this increase in headcount be an explanation for increased expenses? If not, what would explain the dramatic increase in expenses?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/ryanwhitwa...
There's no argument there. The banks and military industrial complex have drastically more influence and power than Silicon Valley, despite SV closing that gap over time.
All politicians, with few exceptions, bow to the feet of the military industrial complex. They all get in line. That's slightly less true for Wall Street, however only slightly.
Every aspect of the US Government is dependent on the Federal Reserve and US banking system, without exception. Silicon Valley companies come and go over the decades, they rise and fall. JP Morgan predates the Fed and has been critical to the US Government for over a century.
Google is a Walmart or the former GM, as far as the politicians in DC are concerned. Powerful, rich, influential, and still not a first tier power in DC. It never can be.
Military, weapons, currency, financing. That's the source of real power, all of DC knows it. Everything else is just a play thing of the moment, inevitably replaced by a new shiny play thing in the next decade or two. Long after Google is gone, banking and military will still be around.
That’s bold!
It's not too far fetched to say the government works in close cooperation with Google to catch ...?
Now think about the pile of money that e.g. Apple is sitting on, and how much political influence that could buy.
"Other revenue" is up 30% YoY. I'd imagine this is mostly Google Cloud (it also includes Pixel and other hardware). In another article I read, Google said "Last year we more than doubled both the number of Google Cloud Platform deals over 1 million as well as the number of multiyear contracts signed" [0]
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/04/alphabet-earnings-q4-2018.ht...
Some of them probably are from HTC acquisition.
> - can't find any Cloud break outs,
They never published cloud break outs, but they posted 6.5B revenue of non ads business, which is essentially cloud + office + pixel sales.
Lobbying is not where power is in US politics. Spending on elections is.
They hired more than half-a-Facebook worth. Where are they finding these people? Seems most other companies are struggling to fill their headcount
https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/4/18211177/alphabet-google-e...
!!???
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/03/alphabets-verily-gets-1-bill...
It makes complete sense, they're obviously in the third position. Why put additional shareholder pressure that can put an enterprise in a position where they're incentivized towards short-term gains vs. the long play that this is..
AWS is bigger and growing at least at the same rate.
I wouldn't bet on Google becoming #1.
I was just pointing out that because techies consider something superior (ergo the myth), it doesn't necessarily "win". Plus in this case I think it's really, really hard to argue that GCP is superior to AWS.
AWS is still blowing them out of the water in the "Enterprise" market, which they are really struggling to break into, but they're pushing hard.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/navy-...
Google Driver File Stream is slower than share drive, along with it always "streaming" in the background. VPNing makes it even worse.
Can't use hotkeys in Google Sheets, and there are limited functions to it as well. I hate clicking when using Excel all day.
Chrome is slow and bloated. Sites sometimes don't render properly.
GMail is slow, and its UI isn't making things better. Notifications do not always appear, and missing a scheduled meeting/call can be embarrassing or make you look irresponsible -- and looking at long email threads can get confusing.
GChat/Hangouts or whatever it's called runs within the browser, which I entirely dislike because it takes up a fraction of what you're looking it -- so I just end up using the hangouts software.
The whole GSuite thing is only good for collaborative purposes. But it slows down the PC so GODDAMN much that it brings inefficiencies and headache. I really wished the employer didn't go Google and chose an alternative.