aangirfan: General Motors, Lehman Brothers, Google...

Thursday, June 25, 2009

General Motors, Lehman Brothers, Google...

What do the following have in common?

General Motors

Ford

Kodak

EMI

Lehman Brothers

MySpace

RBS

HBOS

ICI

Thorn

Lucas

Marconi

These are some of the big companies which have either been 'struggling' or have ceased to exist.

General Motors once sold half the cars in America, but it got too pally with the politicians and relied on their support rather than on keeping in with the customers. (The decline and fall of General Motors.)

Kodak had problems when the digital camera was invented.

EMI had problems when music downloads became common.

New products come along. New competitors arrive. The world speeds up.

When it comes to investing, it can pay to think about mutual funds, rather than individual companies.

Imagine if some clever folks in India, or Washington state, or Cambridge, eventually come up with something as good as Google's Google, AdSense, YouTube and Blogger.

One can imagine a gradual switch away from Google.

After all, Google has made enemies.

And like General Motors it seems to care more about keeping in with governments rather than customers.

Google refuses to have adverts on certain sites.

BtoB Magazine had an article on June 5th 2009 entitled "Declining revenue has publishers rethinking Google AdSense."

AdSense is The (Weak) Elephant in the Room

"Google will (quite rightly) sue publishers who scam the system. But now publishers are suing back, and winning. This is ugly stuff.

"In another murky corner of the Internet are 'made for AdSense' sites that scrape other publishers to generate ad clicks. This is also considered click fraud...

"Let's jump to Google's Q1 2009 results....

"Revenue from Google's partner sites, also known as network revenue or AdSense revenue, fell 3% to $1.64 billion.

"According to the numbers, not all is well with AdSense."

And how long before there is a big switch away from YouTube?