The Remarkable, Predictable Decline of TV

The Remarkable, Predictable Decline of TV

Seven years ago (12 December, 2012) I said it was “The Day TV Died.” There were a LOT of skeptics. At the time, TV was by far still the dominant medium. But the trends were absolutely clear – ad revenues were quickly moving toward on-line opportunities. Print was already well into the grave, and radio was sputtering along with no growth at all. Eyeball momentum had shifted on-line, and thus ads moved on-line, and it was obvious that programming dollars would soon follow – meaning that TV programming was already in Stage 4 termination.

Trends and Tech drove Netflix growth

Meanwhile, Netflix and its brethren were poised to have a fabulous, furious growth. These same trends led me to a full-throated pitch to buy Netflix nine years ago (Nov. 2010.) After Netflix made the decision to raise prices for DVD distribution in order to push people toward streaming the stock crashed, but trends indicated that customer preferences would lead Netflix to be the content winner so despite widespread despair, I called for people to buy the stock in Oct. 2011. In Jan. 2012, I made Netflix one of my top 4 picks for the year. So by Jan. 2013, I was making it clear that TV was has-been, and Netflix was the company to own.

Now, Statista has produced the numbers showing that in 2019 internet media consumption exceeded TV consumption – for the first time ever. And this trend will not stop. It was wholly predictable years ago – and the trends all say this will only accelerate. Where once the competition for entertainment was Netflix, now there is Amazon Prime, Disney+, Comcast Peacock, AT&T HBO Max and Apple TV+. The traditional networks simply don’t have a chance.

Impact of Trends

These trends are having an enormous impact on how we behave, how advertisers behave, what technology we buy, what entertainment we watch, how we use other technology like social media, how we absorb news — and more. So the question is, did you see the trends 7,8,9 years ago? Have you adjusted your strategy? Are you sure where trends are headed, and are you prepared for the future? Will you be a winner as the world changes – in a pretty predictable way – or will you lose out and say “you know, way back when……”

How Google Stole the Show from Apple

How Google Stole the Show from Apple

The three highest valued publicly traded companies today (2/3/16) are Google/Alphabet, Apple and Microsoft.  All 3 are tech companies, and they compete – although with different business models – in multiple markets. However, investor views as to their futures are wildly different.  And that has everything to do with how the leadership teams of these 3 companies have explained their recent results, and described their futures.

Slide1

Looking at the financial performance of these companies, it is impossible to understand the price/earnings multiple assigned to each. Apple clearly had better revenue and earnings performance in all but the most recent year.  Yet, both Alphabet and Microsoft have price to earnings (P/E) multiples that are 3-4 times that of Apple.

 

Slide2

Much was made this week about Alphabet’s valuation exceeding that of Apple’s.  But the really big story is the difference in multiples. If Apple had a multiple even half that of Alphabet or Microsoft it’s value would be much, much higher.

But, as we can see, investors did the best over both 2 years and 5 years by investing in Microsoft.  And Apple investors have fared the poorest of all 3 companies regardless of time frame.  Looking at investment performance, one would think that the revenue and earnings performance of these companies would be the reverse of what’s seen in the first chart.Apple-Google-MSFT

The missing piece, of course, is future expectations.  In this column a few days ago, I pointed out that Apple has done a terrible job explaining its future.  In that column I pointed out how Facebook and Amazon both had stratospheric P/E multiples because they were able to keep investors focused on their future growth story, even more than their historical financial performance.

Alphabet stole the show, and at least briefly the #1 valuation spot, from Apple by convincing investors they will see significant, profitable growth.  Starting even before earnings announcements the company was making sure investors knew that revenues and profits would be up.  But even more they touted the notion that Alphabet has a lot of growth in non-monetized assets.  For example, vastly greater ad sales should be expected from YouTube and Google Maps, as well as app sales for Android phones through Google Play.  And someday on the short horizon profits will emerge from Fiber transmission revenues, smart home revenues via Nest, and even auto market sales now that the company has logged over 1million driverless miles.

This messaging clearly worked, as Alphabet’s value shot up.  Even though 99% of the company’s growth was in “core” products that have been around for a decade!  Yes, ad revenue was up 15%, but most of that was actually on the company’s own web sites.  And most was driven by further price erosion.  The number of paid clicks were up 30%, but price/click was actually down yet another 15% – a negative price trend that has been happening for years. Eventually prices will erode enough that volume will not make up the difference – and what will investors do then?  Rely on the “moonshot” projects which still have almost no revenue, and no proven market performance!

But, the best performer has been Microsoft.  Investors know that PC sales have been eroding for years, that PC sales will continue eroding as users go mobile, and that PC’s are the core of Microsoft’s revenue.  Investors also knows that Microsoft missed the move to mobile, and has practically no market share in the war between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.  Further, investors have known forever that gaming (xBox,) search and entertainment products have always been a money-loser for Microsoft.  Yet, Microsoft investors have done far better than Apple investors, and long-term better than Google investors!

Microsoft has done an absolutely terrific job of constantly trumpeting itself as a company with a huge installed base of users that it can leverage into the future.  Even when investors don’t know how that eroding base will be leveraged, Microsoft continually makes the case that the base is there, that Microsoft is the “enterprise” brand and that those users will stay loyal to Microsoft products.

Forget that Windows 8 was a failure, that despite the billions spent on development Win8 never reached even 10% of the installed base and the company is even dropping support for the product.  Forget that Windows 10 is a free upgrade (meaning no revenue.)  Just believe in that installed base.

Microsoft trumpeted that its Surface tablet sales rose 22% in the last quarter!  Yay! Of course there was no mention that in just the last 6 weeks of the quarter Apple’s newly released iPad Pro actually sold more units than all Surface tablets did for the entire quarter!  Or that Microsoft’s tablet market share is barely registerable, not even close to a top 5 player, while Apple still maintains 25% share.  And investors are so used to the Microsoft failure in mobile phones that the 49% further decline in sales was considered acceptable.

Instead Microsoft kept investors focused on improvements to Windows 10 (that’s the one you can upgrade to for free.)  And they made sure investors knew that Office 365 revenue was up 70%, as 20million consumers now use the product.  Of course, that is a cumulative 20million – compared to the 75million iPhones Apple sold in just one quarter.  And Azure revenue was up 140% – to something that is almost a drop in the bucket that is AWS which is over 10 times the size of all its competitors combined.

To many, this author included, the “growth story” at Microsoft is more than a little implausible.  Sales of its core products are declining, and the company has missed the wave to mobile.  Developers are writing for iOS first and foremost, because it has the really important installed base for today and tomorrow.  And they are working secondarily on Android, because it is in some flavor the rest of the market.  Windows 10 is a very, very distant third and largely overlooked.  xBox still loses money, and the new businesses are all relatively quite small.  Yet, investors in Microsoft have been richly rewarded the last 5 years.

Meanwhile, investors remain fearful of Apple.  Too many recall the 1980s when Apple Macs were in a share war with Wintel (Microsoft Windows on Intel processors) PCs.  Apple lost that war as business customers traded off the Macs ease of use for the lower purchase cost of Windows-based machines.  Will Apple make the same mistake?  Will iPad sales keep declining, as they have for 2 years now?  Will the market shift to mobile favor lower-priced Android-based products?  Will app purchases swing from iTunes to Google Play as people buy lower cost Android-based tablets?  Have iPhone sales really peaked, and are they preparing to fall?  What’s going to happen with Apple now?  Will the huge Apple mobile share be eroded to nothing, causing Apple’s revenues, profits and share price to collapse?

This would be an interesting academic discussion were the stakes not so incredibly high.  As I said in the opening paragraph, these are the 3 highest valued public companies in America.  Small share price changes have huge impacts on the wealth of individual and institutional investors.  It is rather quite important that companies tell their stories as good as possible (which Apple clearly has not, and Microsoft has done extremely well.)  And likewise it is crucial that investors do their homework, to understand not only what companies say, but what they don’t say.

 

 

 

How the trend to renting will kill the PC, and dramatically change IT

How the trend to renting will kill the PC, and dramatically change IT

Last week I gave 1,000 VHS video tapes to Goodwill Industries. These had been accumulated through 30 years of home movie watching, including tapes purchased for entertaining my 3 children.

VCR-VHS

It was startling to realize how many of these I had bought, and also surprising to learn they were basically valueless. Not because the content was outdated, because many are still popular titles. But rather because today the content someone wants can be obtained from a streaming download off Amazon or Netflix more conveniently than dealing with these tapes and a mechanical media player.

It isn’t just a shift in technology that made those tapes obsolete. Rather, a major trend has shifted. We don’t really seek to “own” things any more. We’ve become a world of “renters.”

The choice between owning and renting has long been an option. We could rent video tapes, and DVDs. But even though we often did this, most Boomers also ended up buying lots of them. Boomers wanted to own things. Owning was almost always considered better than renting.

Boomers wanted to own their cars, and often more than one. Auto renting was only for business trips. Boomers wanted to own their houses, and often more than one. Why rent a summer home, when, if you could afford it, you could own one. Rent a boat? Wouldn’t it be better to own your own boat (even if you only use it 10 times/year?)

Now we think very, very differently. I haven’t watched a movie on any hard media in several years. When I find time for video entertainment, I simply download what I want, enjoy it and never think about it again. A movie library seems – well – unnecessary.

As a Boomer, there’s all those CDs, cassette tapes (yes, I have them) and even hundreds of vinyl records I own. Yet, I haven’t listened to any of them in years. It’s far easier to simply turn on Pandora or Spotify – or listen to a channel I’ve constructed on YouTube. I really don’t know why I continue to own those old media players, or the media.

Since the big real estate meltdown many people are finding home ownership to be not as good as renting. Why take such a huge risk, paying that mortgage, if you don’t have to?

That this is a trend is even clearer generationally. Younger people really don’t see the benefit of home ownership, not when it means taking on so much additional debt.   Home ownership costs are so high that it means giving up a lot of other things. And what’s the benefit? Just to say you own your home?

Where Boomers couldn’t wait to own a car, young people are far less likely. Especially in, or near, urban areas. The cost of auto ownership, including maintenance, insurance and parking, becomes really expensive. Compared with renting a ZipCar for a few hours when you really need a car, ownership seems not only expensive, but a downright hassle.

And technology has followed this trend. Once we wanted to own a PC, and on that PC we wanted to own lots of data – including movies, pictures, books – anything that could be digitized. And we wanted to own software applications to capture, view, alter and display that data. The PC was something that fit the Boomer mindset of owning your technology.

But that is rapidly becoming superfluous. With a mobile device you can keep all your data in a cloud. Data you want to access regularly, or data you want to rent. There’s no reason to keep the data on your own hard drive when you can access it 24×7 everywhere with a mobile device.

And the same is true for acting on the data. Software as a service (SaaS) apps allow you to obtain a user license for $10-$20/user, or $.99, or sometimes free. Why spend $200 (or a lot more) for an application when you can accomplish your task by simply downloading a mobile app?

So I no longer want to own a VCR player (or DVD player for that matter) to clutter up my family room. And I no longer want to fill a closet with tapes or cased DVDs. Likewise, I no longer want to carry around a PC with all my data and applications. Instead, a small, easy to use mobile device will allow me to do almost everything I want.

It is this mega trend away from owning, and toward a simpler lifestyle, that will end the once enormous PC industry. When I can do all I really want to do on my connected device – and in fact often do more things because of those hundreds of thousands of apps – why would I accept the size, weight, complexity, failure problems and costs of the PC?

And, why would I want to own something like Microsoft Office? It is a huge set of applications which contain dozens (hundreds?) of functions I never use.   Wouldn’t life be much simpler, easier and cheaper if I acquire the rights to use the functionality I need, when I need it?

There was a time I couldn’t imagine living without my media players, and those DVDs, CDs, tapes and records. But today, I’m giving lots of them away – basically for recycling. While we still use PCs for many things today, it is now easy to visualize a future where I use a PC about as often as I now use my DVD player.

In that world, what happens to Microsoft? Dell? Lenovo?

The implications of this are far-reaching for not only our personal lives, and personal technology suppliers, but for corporate IT. Once IT managed mainframes. Then server farms, networks and thousands of PCs. What will a company need an IT department to do if employees use their own mobile devices, across common networks, using apps that cost a few bucks and store files on secure clouds?

If corporate technology is reduced to just operating some “core” large functions like accounting, how big – or strategic – is IT? The “T” (technology) becomes irrelevant as people focus on gathering and analyzing information. But that’s not been the historical training for IT employees.

Further, if Salesforce.com showed us that even big corporations can manage something as critical as their customer information in a SaaS environment on mobile devices, is it not possible to imagine accounting and supply chain being handled the same way? If so, what role will IT have at all?

The trend toward renting rather than owning is monumental. It affects every business. But in an ironic twist of fate, it may dramatically reduce the focus on IT that has been so critical for the Boomer generation.

 

The Day TV Died – Winners and Losers (Comcast, Disney, CBS)

Remember when almost everyone read a daily newspaper

Newspaper readership peaked around 2000.  Since then printed media has declined, as readers shifted on-line.  Magazines have folded, and newspapers have disappeared, quit printing, dramatically cut page numbers and even more dramatically cut staff. 

Amazingly, almost no major print publisher prepared for this, even though the trend was becoming clear in the late 1990s. 

Newspapers are no longer a viable business.  While industry revenue grew for
almost 2 centuries, it collapsed in a mere decade.

Newspaper ad spending 1950-2010
Chart Source: BusinessInsider.com

This market shift created clear winners, and losers.  On-line news sites like Marketwatch and HuffingtonPost were clear winners.  Losers were traditional newspaper companies such as Tribune Corporation, Gannett, McClatchey, Dow Jones and even the New York Times Company.  And investors in these companies either saw their values soar, or practically disintegrate. 

In 2012 it is equally clear that television is on the brink of a major transition.  Fewer people are content to have their entertainment programmed for them when they can program it themselves on-line.  Even though the number of television channels has exploded with pervasive cable access, the time spent watching television is not growing.  While simultaneously the amount of time people spend looking at mobile internet displays (tablets, smartphones and laptops) is growing at double digit rates.

Web v mobile v TV consumption
Chart Source: Silicone Alley Insider Chart of the Day 12/5/12

It would be easy to act like newspaper defenders and pretend that television as we've known it will not change.  But that would be, at best, naive.  Just look around at broadband access, the use of mobile devices, the convenience of mobile and the number of people that don't even watch traditional TV any more (especially younger people) and the trend is clear.  One-way preprogrammed advertising laden television is not a sustainable business. 

So, now is the time to prepare.  And change your business to align with impending new realities.

Losers, and winners, will be varied – and not entirely obvious.  Firstly, a look at those trying to maintain the status quo, and likely to lose the most.

Giant consumer goods and retail companies benefitted from the domination of television.  Only huge companies like P&G, Kraft, GM and Target could afford to lay out billions of dollars for television ads to build, and defend, a brand.  But what advantage will they have when TV budgets no longer control brand building?  They will become extremely vulnerable to more innovative companies that have better products and move on fast lifecycles. Their size, hierarchy and arcane business practices will lead to huge problems.  Imagine a raft of new Hostess Brands experiences.

Even as the trends have started changing these companies have continued pumping billions into the traditional TV networks as they spend to defend their brand position.  This has driven up the value of companies like CBS, Comcast (owns NBC) and Disney (owns ABC) over the last 3 years substantially. But don't expect that to last forever. Or even a few more years.

Just like newspaper ad spending fell off a cliff when it was clear the eyeballs were no longer there, expect the same for television ad spending.  As giant advertisers find the cost of television harder and harder to justify their outlays will eventually take the kind of cliff dive observed in the chart (above) for newspaper advertising.  Already some consumer goods and ad agency executives are alluding to the fact that the rate of return on traditional TV is becoming sketchy.

So far, we've seen little at the companies which own TV networks to demonstrate they are prepared for the floor to fall out of their revenue stream.  While some have positions in a few internet production and delivery companies, most are clearly still doing their best to defend & extend the old business – just like newspaper owners did.  Just as newspapers never found a way to replace the print ad dollars, these television companies look very much like businesses that have no apparent solution for future growth.  I would not want my 401K invested in any major network company.

And there will be winners.

For smaller businesses, there has never been a better time to compete.  A company as small as Tesla or Fisker can now create a brand on-line at a fraction of the old cost.  And that brand can be as powerful as Ford, and potentially a lot more trendy. There are very low entry barriers for on-line brand building using not only ad words and web page display ads, but also using social media to build loyal followers who use and promote a brand.  What was once considered a niche can become well known almost overnight simply by applying the new dynamics of reaching customers on-line, and increasingly via mobile.  Look at the success of Toms Shoes.

Zappos and Amazon have shown that with almost no television ads they can create powerhouse retail brands.  The new retailers do not compete just on price, but are able to offer selection, availability and customer service at levels unachievable by traditional brick-and-mortar retailers.  They can suggest products and prices of things you're likely to need, even before you realize you need them.  They can educate better, and faster, than most retail store employees.  And they can offer great prices due to less overhead, along with the convenience of shipping the product right into your home. 

And as people quit watching preprogrammed TV, where will they go for content?  Anybody streaming will have an advantage – so think Netflix (which recently contracted for all the Disney content,) Amazon, Pandora, Spotify and even AOL.  But, this will also benefit those companies providing content access such as Apple TV, Google TV, YouTube (owned by Google) to offer content channels and the increasingly omnipresent Facebook will deliver up not only friends, but content — and ads. 

As for content creation, the deep pockets of traditional TV production companies will likely disappear along with their ability to control distribution.  That means fewer big-budget productions as risk goes up without revenue assurances. 

But that means even more ability for newer, smaller companies to create competitive content seeking audiences.  Where once a very clever, hard working Seth McFarlane (creator of Family Guy) had to hardscrabble with networks to achieve distribution, and live in fear of a single person controlling his destiny, in the future these creative people will be able to own their content and capture the value directly as they build a direct audience.  A phenomenon like George Lucas will be more achievable than ever before as what might look like chaos during transition will migrate to a much more competitive world where audiences, rather than network executives, will decide what content wins – and loses.

So, with due respects to Don McLean, will today be the day TV Died?  We will only know in historical context.  Nobody predicted newspapers had peaked in 2000, but it was clear the internet was changing news consumption behavior.  And we don't know if TV viewership will begin its rapid decline in 2013, or in a couple more years. But the inevitable change is clear – we just don't know exactly when.

So it would be foolish to not think that the industry is going to change dramatically.  And the impact on advertising will be even more profound, much more profound, than it was in print.  And that will have an even more profound impact on American society – and how business is done. 

What are you doing to prepare?

 

 

Sell Google – Lot of Heat, Not Much Light

With revenues up 39% last quarter, it's far too soon to declare the death of Google.  Even in techville, where things happen quickly, the multi-year string of double-digit higher revenues insures survival – at least for a while. 

However, there are a lot of problems at Google which indicate it is not a good long-term hold for investors.  For traders there is probably money to be made, as this long-term chart indicates:

Google long term chart 5-3.12
Source: Yahoo Finance May 3, 2012

While there has been enormous volatility, Google has yet to return to its 2007 highs and struggles to climb out of the low $600/share price range.  And there's good reason, because Google management has done more to circle the wagons in self-defense than it has done to create new product markets.

What was the last exciting product you can think of from Google?  Something that was truly new, innovative and being developed into a market changer?  Most likely, whatever you named is something that has recently been killed, or receiving precious little management attention.  For a company that prided itself on innovation – even reportedly giving all employees 20% of their time to do whatever they wanted – we see management actions that are decidedly not about promoting innovation into the market, or making sustainable efforts to create new markets:

  • killed Google Powermeter, a project that could have redefined how we buy and use electricity
  • killed Google Wave, a product that offered considerable group productivity improvement
  • killed Google Flu Vaccine Finder offering new insights for health care from data analysis
  • killed Google Related which could have helped all of us search beyond keywords
  • killed Google synch for Blackberry as it focuses on selling Android
  • killed Google Talk mobile app
  • killed the OnePass Google payment platform for publishers
  • killed Google Labs – once its innovation engine
  • and there are rumors it is going to kill Google Finance

All of these had opportunities to redefine markets.  So what did Google do with these redeployed resources:

  • Bought Motorola for $12.5billion, which it hopes to take toe-to-toe with Apple's market leading iPhone, and possibly the iPad.  And in the process has aggravated all the companies who licensed Android and developed products which will now compete with Google's own products.  Like the #1 global handset manufacturer Samsung.  And which offers no clear advantage to the Apple products, but is being offered at a lower price.
  • Google+, which has become an internal obsession – and according to employees consumes far more resources than anyone outside Google knows.  Google+ is a product going toe-to-toe with Facebook, only with no clear advantages. Despite all the investment, Google continues refusing to publish any statistics indicating that Google+ is growing substantially, or producing any profits, in its catch-up competition with Facebook.

In both markets, mobile phones and social media, Google has acted very unlike the Google of 2000 that innovated its way to the top of web revenues, and profits. Instead of developing new markets, Google has chosen to undertaking 2 Goliath battles with enormously successful market leaders, but without any real advantage.

Google has actually proven, since peaking in 2007, that its leadership is remarkably old-fashioned, in the worst kind of way.  Instead of focusing on developing new markets and opportunities, management keeps focusing on defending and extending its traditional search business – and has proven completely inept at developing any new revenue streams.  Google bought both YouTube and Blogger, which have enormous user bases and attract incredible volumes of page views – but has yet to figure out how to monetize either, after several years.

For its new market innovations, rather than setting up teams dedicated to turning its innovations into profitable revenue growth engines Google leadership keeps making binary decisions.  Messrs. Page and Brin either decide the product and market aren't self-developing, and kill the products, or simply ignore the business opportunity and lets it drift.  Much like Microsoft – which has remained focused on Windows and Office while letting its Zune, mobile and other products drift into oblivion – or lose huge amounts of money like Bing and for years XBox.

I personalized that last comment onto the Google founders intentionally.  The biggest news out of Google lately has been a pure financial machination done for purely political reasons.  Announcing a stock dividend that effectively creates a 2-for-1 split, only creating a new class of non-voting "C" stock to make sure the founders never lose voting control.  This was adding belt to suspenders, because the founders already own the Class B stock giving them 66% voting control.  The purpose was purely to make sure nobody every tries to buy, or otherwise take over Google, because the founders will always have enough votes to make such an action impossible.

The founders explained this as necessary so they could retain control and make "big bets."  If "big bets" means dumping billions into also-ran products as late entrants, then they have good reason to fear losing company control.  Making big bets isn't how you win in the information technology industry.  You win by creating new markets, with new solutions, before the competition does it. 

Apple's huge wins in iPod, iTouch, iTunes, iPhone and iPad weren't "big bets."  The Apple R&D budget is 1/8 Microsoft's.  It's not big bets that win, its developing innovation, putting it into the market, shepharding it through a series of learning cycles to make it better and better and meeting previously unmet – often unidentified – needs.  And that's not what the enormous investments in mobile handsets and Google+ are about.

Although this stock split has no real impact on Google today, it is a signal.  A signal of a leadership team more obsessed with their own control than doing good for investors.  It is clearly a diversion from creating new products, and opening new markets.  But it was the centerpiece of communication at the last earnings call.  And that is a avery bad signal for investors.  A signal that the leaders see things likely to become much worse, with cash going out and revenue struggling, before too long.  So they are acting now to protect themselves.

Meanwhile, even as revenues grew 39% last quarter, there are signs of problems in Google's "core" market leadership is so fixated on defending.  As this chart shows, while volume of paid ads is going up, the price is now going down. Google price per click 4-2012

Source: Silicon Alley Insider

Prices go down when your product loses value.  You have to chase revenue.  Remember Proctor & Gamble's "Basics" product line launch?  Chasing revenue by cutting price.  In the short-term it can be helpful, but long-term it is not in your best interest.  Google isn't just cutting price on its incremental sales, but on all sales.  Increasingly advertisers are becoming savvy about what they can expect from search ads, and what they can expect from other venues – like Facebook – and the prices are reflecting expectations.  In a recent Strata survey the top 2 focus for ad executives were "social" (69%) and "display" (71%) – categories where Facebook leads – and both are ahead of "search."

At Facebook, we know the user base is around 800million.  We also know it's now the #1 site on the internet – more hits than Google.  And Facebook has much longer average user times on site.  All things attractive to advertisers.  Facebook is acquiring Instagram, which positions it much stronger on mobile devices, thus growing its market.  And while Google was talking about share splits, Facebook recently announced it was making Facebook email integrated into the Facebook platform much easier to use (which is a threat to Gmail) and it was adding a new analytics suite to help advertisers understand ad performance – like they are accustomed to at Google.  All of which increases Facebook's competitiveness with Google, as customers shift increasingly to social platforms.

As said at the top of this article, Google won't be gone soon.  But all signs point to a rough road for investors.  The company is ditching its game changing products and dumping enormous sums into me-too efforts trying to catch well healed and well managed market leaders.  The company has not created an ability to take new innovations to market, and remains stuck defending and extending its existing business lines.  And the top leaders just signaled that they weren't comfortable they could lead the company successfully, so they implemented new programs to make sure nobody could challenge their leadership. 

There are big fires burning at Google.  Unfortunately, burning those resources is producing a lot of heat – but not much light on a successful future.  It's time to sell Google.