Google stock soars on good news from Mountain View
On Wednesday, Google revealed that sales earnings, excluding the revenue it passed on to partner sites, had risen to $6.92 billion, a good deal higher than most estimates put forth by analysts. Today, Wall Street responded positively to the news, sending Google shares up as much as 11 percent, to $588.27.
"We had a great quarter, with revenue up 32 percent year on year for a record breaking over $9 billion of revenue," new Google CEO Larry Page wrote in a letter to investors this week. "I’m super excited about the amazing response to Google+ which lets you share just like in real life." Amazing response is right – although early reviews of the social networking platform were fairly lukewarm, millions of new users have flocked to Google+ in recent days.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday Google+ received an official benediction from none other than Times columnist David Pogue, who argued that on several fronts, Google had managed to actually out-Facebook Facebook. "Until now, Facebook and Twitter have been the Dominant Duo of social networking," he wrote. "But Google’s less sprawling, more video-centric, better-controlled new service is already too good to ignore. Now it’s the Dominant Duo ...+1."
Google+, of course, doesn't account for all that enthusiasm from the folks on Wall Street.
There's also Page himself, who took the reins at Mountain View in April of this year. And then there is Android, Google's great big success of a mobile operating system. Horizons readers will remember that back in December of 2010, Google announced that it was activating 300,000 Android phones a day, a boost from the 200,000 activations it had logged a few months before. Then in June of this year, Google's Andy Rubin revealed that a whopping half million Android devices were being activated every day.
Point is: People are flocking to Android pretty fast, and the faster Google gobbles up shares of the global market, the happier investors get.
