Google stock redux

Will Google tomorrow become Microsoft yesterday?

The leading cause of megacorp death is not starvation, it’s indigestion.

Jason Calcanis wrote an excellent post about Google’s comprehensive strategy to sustain itself profitably into the foreseeable future.

What struck me most was not just the ‘wow, they do all that‘ but: ‘Wow, how do they manage to do all that?’

Google is not trying to extricate every value within its processes. They are tolerating and encouraging a deliberate and highly regulated amount of waste in its incubated companies.

The discipline to synthesize so many disparate and divergent businesses operating under one tent and allocating and prioritizing finite resources?

  • All of this while challenging its startups to think outside of the box
  • While within the box of Google.

Too much cash has a penalty, it can take it further away from sustaining, or securing a market leadership position. Having immense wealth to pursue prestige innovation, research and development can become a distraction and an expensive hobby.

I have been a shareholder of Google for many years. It’s my mutual fund and wallet. They can deploy capital better than I can. It’s also better than any attempts by Cisco, Lucent to build an ecosystem of companies that can be further developed on their platform. The hurdle in that model is a reliance on 3rd party VC/PE funding. Although the mega is not committing a lot of internal resources – putting that startup and its management into the megacorp org chart, you are trying to fill a hole in your own product offering, thereby also fueling new entrants that will copy and paste that model and become tomorrow’s competitor. 

At one time, my ‘mutual fund’ was Microsoft. Until they weren’t. Growth is a cycle and Google is in its glory.

Maybe my Facebook and Tesla stock will catch up.

Tomorrow?

“Not being tense but ready.
Not thinking but not dreaming.
Not being set but flexible.
Liberation from the uneasy sense of confinement.
It is being wholly and quietly alive, aware and alert, ready for whatever may come.”
―Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do