Google, IBM, and the Wall Street Funhouse
Google down; IBM up? What's the deal?
Not that this is news to anybody, but trying to get a sense of what's actually going on in a company by looking at its stock price is like trying to get a sense of a person by looking at his reflection in a funhouse mirror.
Google shares are off their highs by so much, the AP writes today that Google's "once-robust stock is looking haggard." Haggard? Well, only if you were one of the dopes who bought it at $700 a share last fall. If you bought GOOG three years ago at $200, you're still feeling pretty good. It's now about $464.
Google is not some company that landed from outer space and is immune to human economic trends. The U.S. economy is slowing. When that happens, advertising spending drops from previous levels. Google will feel that just like every other media entity. But Google, the hottest new advertising medium of the past decade, will feel it less than most. It is also still the company to beat on the Web -- perhaps the most powerful company in tech. Nothing much has changed about Google in the past few months other than bad news about the economy.
And then IBM is bouncing skyward because of one piece of news: that it will spend $15 billion buying back its own stock. That doesn't change a thing about IBM's business -- which has quietly been doing very well the past few years. If anything, the news might make you wonder whether IBM would be better off in the future if it spent the $15 billion on R&D or acquisitions instead of blatantly boosting its own stock price.
For those reasons, if you tied me down and forced me to invest for the long term in either GOOG or IBM based on what's happening today, I'd take GOOG.
Loading...
Thank you for registering as a Portfolio.com Insider. Your comment has been added.
Create Your Public Profile- First Bytes: SEC Eyes Tweets, Waiting on a Verizon iPhone
- Apr 27 2009 9:10AM EDT
- Last Bytes: A New MySpaceFace, Technological Necessities
- Apr 24 2009 5:22PM EDT
- What the One Billionth Downloader Won
- Apr 24 2009 2:37PM EDT
- The End of Innocence at Apple
- Apr 24 2009 11:25AM EDT
- First Bytes: Social Videos, 1 Billion Apps, Mt. Everest Calls
- Apr 24 2009 10:23AM EDT
- Last Bytes: Microsoft and Amazon, Two Tales of the Economy
- Apr 23 2009 5:40PM EDT
- Dell's Plastic Surgery
- Apr 23 2009 3:12PM EDT
- Why High Tech Needs the Wall Street Quants
- Apr 23 2009 11:20AM EDT
- First Bytes: New Blood at MySpace, Steve Jobs Testimony
- Apr 23 2009 9:05AM EDT
- Last Bytes: Apple Profit Soars; eBay Profit Falls
- Apr 22 2009 5:04PM EDT
- Earth Day Special: Gadgets to Green Your Lifestyle
- Apr 22 2009 1:52PM EDT
- First Bytes: Cyberspies and Belgian Bots
- Apr 22 2009 9:55AM EDT
- Last Bytes: Is Texting Passé? Not Yet.
- Apr 21 2009 5:52PM EDT
- Happy 20th Birthday, Game Boy
- Apr 21 2009 4:11PM EDT
- Gaming Geeks (and Curt Schilling) Unite!
- Apr 21 2009 12:43PM EDT
Categories
Links
- Kevin Maney's site

- TechCrunch

- GigaOM

- Engadget

- USA TODAY Tech

- Romenesko

- BuzzTracker Tech

- Roger McGuinn's Folk Den

- Maney's band on MySpace

- Spiedies, mmmm

- Somewhat Frank's tech conference list

- Marc Andreessen

- Mark Cuban's blog

- Tom Foremski

- Fred Wilson

- Pandora

- SciTech Daily

- Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog

- Steven Johnson

- The Long Tail

- paidContent

- John Battelle's SearchBlog







