Their stock price reflects their ad moat, and nothing more.
In my opinion, their stock price is the least interesting. They are coming around on the other side of an upswing and seem poised to be headed back down towards their pre-COVID normalization of around 90 dollars. Compared to Amazon, it's disappointing, and Microsoft is in another galaxy in comarison. With no real option for growth, considering they simply cannot be trusted to launch a new product, it seems like the early feedback is this will also hurt their cloud business as customers simply cannot trust them to maintain new offerings.
They'll do what they always have done: survive off ads and YouTube. But I am not sure how many more percentage points they can squeeze out of those two. People are already starting to catch whiff that their search engine results are not what they used to be. What will happen then?
If history is doomed to repeat itself, they'll do what their predecessors have done: get some Harvard-style MBA types in the building to "optimize", jettison all the excess baggage, and keep the cash flowing into their investors pockets, while they slowly lose whats left of their reputation and ability to innovate.
I suppose they have enough patents to troll on for the next 25+ years or so. Just like some other 3 letter company we may know about that once was a tech giant.
We're not talking about profit (which is dictated by depreciation of capital intensive investments), we're talking about adoption the service. GCP is alive and well.
Adoption has never paid a bill, anyone can sell a bunch of dollars for 95 cents and you can’t just hand wave away depreciation, servers have to be replaced, they aren’t just keeping the same servers online forever.
I wasn't saying that. You have no idea what % of overall revenue is GSuite vs core GCP. Until you do, your "mostly gsuite" is purely speculation.
> Adoption has never paid a bill, anyone can sell a bunch of dollars for 95 cents and you can’t just hand wave away depreciation, servers have to be replaced, they aren’t just keeping the same servers online forever.
I wasn't hand waving away depreciation. I was saying the depreciation (which is when capital hits the IS) is very likely going to outpace revenue for years given the growth rate of cloud adoption. We're talking at least another 10 years before they stop allocating capital towards data centers. To illustrate this further:
year 0 - $1B for data center buildings + server racks
year 5 - $200M for refresh of server racks
So, profit will come much much later. Amazon has proven this many times over.
There stock price would say otherwise: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/?guccounter=1
Until people stop using their service(s) then, no, their brand is not dying.