The Case For Why Google Is Doomed With Sudden Shift to Mobile

Here's why Google is doomed as the world rapidly shifts to mobile from desktops. Get read to say "Ask Siri" instead of "Google It"

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Despite Rosy Q3 Results, These Are The 11 Most Serious Questions Still Facing Facebook

Facebook offered some rosy data points in its earnings yesterday, but there are still 11 serious questions facing the company going forward.

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Why Google Could 'Disappear' in 5 Years

My discussion today on @SquawkStreet about the challenges mobile presents to $GOOG:



[Long YHOO & AAPL]

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Here's My Fix for Facebook: Make Facebook a Subsidiary of Instagram With Zuck Reporting to Systrom

How could you radically remake Facebook into a mobile company? Make it a subsidiary of Instagram with Kevin Systrom running it.

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Why Mobile And Music Are a Must: Interview With Songza Co-Founder Eric Davich

I’ve mentioned Songza in the last few months in these posts. It’s my favorite mobile music app at the moment for its expert curation of different music moods that I often like to listen to during the day.  I discover a great number of new artists and songs because of it.

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Twitter is Now Twice as Big as Facebook - Here's Why

Katy Finneran of Bloomberg just tweeted that “Twitter’s 2012 mobile ad revenue exceeds Facebook‘s 2012 mobile ad revenue, $129.7 million to $72.7 million.” These numbers are eMarketer.

That’s huge news.  It essentially means that Twitter is now a bigger company than Facebook.  Here’s why.

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Facebook's Biggest Problem: Mobile

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Reading The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal this past weekend, you would have thought that the biggest issue facing Facebook(FB_) is whether it should stay listed on Nasdaq or move to the New York Stock Exchange.


This issue is a total sideshow, and I would fear for the company if CEO Mark Zuckerberg was spending any time thinking about it.


No, the big issue dogging Facebook these days is the shift to mobile from the desktop.

Many speculate this shift happened much faster in the second quarter than anyone had expected, and that it was responsible for the reduced guidance in the days before Facebook's initial public offering that spooked big institutional investors and hammered the stock.

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Why Android Users Are Clueless and What that Means for Apple and Google

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Apple(AAPL_) took a few shots at Google(GOOG_) last week during their WWDC keynote.'


Even Siri poked fun at Google's names for their different versions of their operating systems (Ice Cream Sandwich, Cupcake and FroYo): "Who came up with these names, Ben & Jerry's?"


But the really stunning stat to come out at the conference was from Scott Forstall, who is the head of Apple's mobile software. He pointed out that more than 80% of Apple's iOS users were running the latest version of iOS. However, only 7% of Google Android users are running the latest version of their software.

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Why Facebook Doesn't Have Mobile In Its Founding DNA - and Why That Spells Disaster

Facebook - and all companies - have a founding DNA that is the key to their success.  However, when the competitive environment shifts, what served them so well in one generation is a mismatch to the next generation.

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After Dismissing Mobile for the Last 2 Years, Facebook's Zuckerberg Gets Religion. Will It Matter?

Mobile is going to be the biggest challenge ever faced by Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.  Here's why.

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Eric Jackson on Outlook for Google, Facebook

May 25 (Bloomberg) -- Eric Jackson, founder of Ironfire Capital LLC, talks about the outlook for Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. Jackson speaks with Deirdre Bolton on Bloomberg Television's "In the Loop." (Source: Bloomberg)

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"Mobile Is Going To Crush Facebook"

Is the shift from desktop to mobile happening even faster than expected?

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Here's Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years

We think of Google and Facebook as Web gorillas.  They’ll be around forever. Yet, with the rate that the tech world is moving these days, there are good reasons to think both might be gone completely in 5 – 8 years.  And there’s some academic theory to back up that view, along with casual observations from recent history.


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The Two Companies on Facebook's Menu After IPO: Nokia and Yahoo!

Facebook needs to bulk up to kill Google.  Once they go public, watch for them to seriously consider buying Nokia or Yahoo! -- with a little help from their big brother Microsoft.

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Facebook Makes Nothing from Mobile Now and Seems to Have Ignored It All Last Year

Mobile is one of Facebook's biggest risk factors, but the company doesn't seem to have worked much on it in the last year going by their apps.

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Mobile-Phone Game Is Apple's to Lose

By Eric Jackson
RealMoney Contributor
2/3/2011 1:00 PM EST
Click here for more stories by Eric Jackson

I was on CNNMoney's "Bullhorn" show earlier this week talking to Paul La Monica and Howard Lindzon about who is going to win the mobile-phone war. The consensus is that it's Apple's (AAPL - commentary -Trade Now) game to lose. I agree with this view. A report last week, which Jim Cramer re-tweeted, showed that Apple had 50% of the total profits made by all mobile-phone software and handset makers. That's truly astounding.

The biggest concern you hear these days about Apple is the worry of Steve Jobs' succession plan. However, the market's action since he took medical leave on Martin Luther King Day shows that most people have gotten over that initial shock. They are also very comfortable with Tim Cook steering the ship from now on if need be. The Southern boy from Alabama has been rock-solid on analyst calls over the past few years and ensured a successful rollout of iPhone 4, iPad and now iPad 2.

The only other threat to Apple I've heard raised is that people don't want to deal with a monolithic supplier. However, this threat isn't raised by actual consumers -- just Apple's competitors. Have you seen the new Super Bowl ad for Motorola's (MMI - commentary -Trade Now) Xoom, which is its Android-based tablet? It's comical because A.) it never shows the Xoom working (probably because it's not at the moment), and B.) the company paint Apple as the Orwellian thought controller which Apple fought against in its famous 1984 Super Bowl ad.

The biggest threat to Apple is clearly Google (GOOG - commentary - Trade Now) with its Android operating system. It's not making any money off this software, which many handset makers are putting on their phones, but according to Google's last earnings call, it is now activating 300,000 Android phones each day. When the time comes for Google to monetize those phones, believe me, it will. In the meantime, Google is benefiting from the additional search queries and display ads.

...

[*** This post is an excerpt of the full article, available by clicking here to go to RealMoney.com. Note: subscription required. ***]

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Google's Turning Point

By Eric Jackson
RealMoney Contributor
10/18/2010 5:30 PM EDT
Click here for more stories by Eric Jackson

Google (GOOG - commentary - Trade Now) earnings last Thursday were a turning point for the company. Even after Friday's big 10% bump up in price, the stock is still down 3% for the year. Negativity has surrounded the company for most of the year -- some of it deserved, in my view, because of missteps (like Google's awkward and ill-advised withdrawal from China in the spring), and some of it not.

The concern for investors for much of the year -- aside from the whole China kerfuffle -- has been whether Google is just a one-trick pony.

Sure, it's been a hell of a pony, but investors have been wondering if Google could leverage its dominance in text ads for search into other areas. The company has thrown a lot of pasta against the wall over the years -- everything from Google Wave to Orkut to its $1.6 billion acquisition of YouTube a few years back - but not a lot has stuck in terms of meaningful profits... at least, not yet.

So, what was so eye-catching about Thursday's earnings call was that Google decided to give some specific data on its key new areas of growth.

The key stats revealed by the company were that:

The mobile business is contributing more than $1 billion annually in revenue (calculated by taking the last quarter's revenues and annualizing them)

Display advertising (as a result of the Double-Click acquisition a couple of years ago and the YouTube display ads) is contributing more than $2.5 billion annually in revenue (calculated using the same methodology as mobile)

More than 2 billion YouTube videos are viewed each week

What also seemed to surprise analysts on the upside was a drop in Google's TAC (traffic acquisition costs) in the quarter. Google is no longer paying News Corp's (NWS - commentary - Trade Now) MySpace for traffic under a very lucrative (for MySpace) agreement, struck a number of years ago when MySpace was still the big dog of the social-networking space.

So, the market is starting to sit up and take notice of Google again in the last two days. And why not? These metrics are important indicators of the company's future success.

The area that intrigues me most -- as a long holder of GOOG -- is mobile. This $1 billion in revenue is all from mobile ads. Google is still in a land-grab mode with Android. It continues to give away the operating system for free to carriers in order to drive adoption. And that is certainly working, as Android has grown from nothing to major mobile player in the last year. Many expect it to surpass Apple (AAPL - commentary- Trade Now) in terms of mobile market share soon, as it is now part of so many devices.

...

[*** This post is an excerpt of the full article, available by clicking here to go to RealMoney.com. Note: subscription required. ***]

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Microsoft: What Wall Street Is Overlooking, Part 1

By Eric Jackson10/13/10 - 11:30 AM EDT

NEW YORK (TheStreet ) -- Microsoft(MSFT_) continues to be a much maligned stock on Wall Street, even though it's quietly become a large holding by many hedge funds over the past few months, including John Burbank's Passport Capital and Lee Ainsle's Maverick Capital. Both mentioned the stock in their Value Investing Conference talk in New York recently.

In an interview with TheStreet, Bill Koefoed, Microsoft GM of Investor Relations, talks about what he believes investors are missing in their analysis of the company. Here's Part 1 of the interview.

Eric Jackson: Most people following the company get the Windows 7 and Office upgrade cycle going on. But do you still think they're missing part of that story?

Bill Koefoed: There is a lot of strength across our businesses, including Windows and Office, and that's where people tend to gravitate in terms of the story. We have eight main business focus areas that drive our future, but I think as people think about Microsoft, sometimes they think there are just a couple of focus areas, Windows and Office. We have been investing in eight focus areas.

The first is really Xbox and TV. We feel great about the future of the Xbox business as this year we are going to have just a phenomenal game lineup. We have 25 million members on Xbox LIVE, which has been growing pretty substantially.

In addition to the subscription component of Xbox LIVE, we also have the ability to offer transactional items, whether it's a relationship with Netflix(NFLX_) that you could buy, things like map packs or other accessories and communications and collaboration items.

Xbox LIVE is very exciting and we feel it has an industry-leading capability. You will continue to see us develop that capability as we add Kinect and we can extend the Xbox console to more of a casual gamer or even people that want to use the Xbox for entertainment purposes. And we think there are a lot of great applications for that as we go forward.

The next area is Windows Phone. We launched Windows Phone 7 recently and the reviews have been exciting. We are committed to this market and see Windows Phone 7 as a way to bring the entire breadth of Microsoft assets to a mobile experience.

The next area is Bing. We continue to see phenomenal opportunities around the search business. It continues to be one that we think has very attractive economics. It tends to be one that has a margin profile that we really like and one that tends to be a software problem to solve. We feel like we've got the best software team on the planet. So we're very enthusiastic about Bing and continue to be.

........

[** This post is an excerpt of the full article, which is available on TheStreet.com by clicking here. Free Site.**]

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