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cloudwalking

I doubt Google would shut down a $3,200,000,000.00 acquisition.

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Please don't include decimals on that kind of number, it's intellectually dishonest.

That's a 12 digit acquisition!

? Only if you're incapable of telling the difference between commas and periods, I suppose.

It isn't factually dishonest, because it is an accurate number, and anyone can make sense of it.

I say it is intellectually dishonest because it reads to me as a clear attempt to make the number appear more impressive.

Borrowing from Wikipedia, "intellectual honesty":

   Facts are presented in an unbiased manner, and not twisted to give misleading impressions

It would still be accurate to say it was a $3,200,000,000.000,000,000,000 valuation, but I hope you will agree this is misrepresenting information.

Eh, guess we're going to agree to disagree there. Dollar figures having two decimal places at the end is pretty much a standard. If they included 3, yeah, that would reek of shiftiness. On top of that, all of the press releases I see don't even include the full amount written out, just "$3.2B".

Nobody puts commas in the decimal places.

You might as well say that he shouldn't put any zeros there at all, because all those zeros make it more impressive than saying "3.2 billion".

This is known as "rhetoric". The art of making a point. For sure the zeroes are being written out in full to make the number look more impressive. And the cents are given for exactly the same reason! What else would they be there for?! Writing out large numbers in full is a valid tactic to make a point, just as is hiding all those zeroes away behind an abbreviation.

Maybe he thinks "3.2bn" is less impressive than the actual number, and is just righting a wrong. That would be a reasonable thing to believe.

decimals doesn't have commas, if you want to add 12 digits of precision then you should have to write: $3,200,000,000.000000000000 , also when writing down a money amount, those two extra digits are for the cents(exactly 2 digits of precision), It would be ultra weird to write with 1 or 3 digits of precision, or zero for that matter.

You do know that many locales invert the meaning of the comma and period in that scenario, right?

Right?

I think it's pretty damn obvious what was meant by $3,200,000,000.00 no matter what locale you are in.

> ? Only if you're incapable of telling the difference between commas and periods, I suppose.

There's a reason people don't use Prolog...

It may be incorrect too, since the source only had 2 significant figures.

Perhaps you should step away from your PC for a bit? Christ.

Arguing that somebody shouldn't expand a large number because you personally now perceive this number differently and therefore it is intellectually dishonest is a bit of a squirrely argument, don't you think?

We're all capable thinking humans here. That isn't to say that smart people cannot be swayed with rhetoric and such, but don't you think that the same argument you're making here could be made against compressing such large numbers? Maybe expanding that number isn't so much exaggerating its value as it is simply impressing upon us its true enormity.

$3.2B ($3,200,000,000.00) is a lot of fucking money, after all. For anybody.

$3.2M would be a truckload of money too, but on a Google scale, "This number is really enormous!" is a weak argument. $3.2B is less than 1% of their market cap. Relative terms are much more important than "how many zeros"; why, just recently, Google took a $150M loss in Q3'2012 on the Motorola division. They aren't afraid of 9-figure losses. Thus (IMO) $3.2B being a large number has little bearing on whether or not Google would be willing to take a writedown on Nest, for the right reasons.

I'm not worried about a shutdown as much as I am worried about it going into maintenance mode like Google Voice.

That is a legitimate concern, however, the press release says this: "Nest will continue to operate under the leadership of Tony Fadell and with its own distinct brand identity."

For now.

I think about the Flip Video -- a reasonably-priced, small video recorder that could capture up to 2 hours of HD video. It was purchased by Cisco in 2009, and the product line was killed 23 months later. This was before a large number of consumers had quality smartphone cameras.

Google had a good reason to drop $3.2B on Nest. Providing useful products that consumers love is not it.

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