Amr Awadallah’s post today asking whether GOOG will miss its Q405 earnings targets, picked up by Battelle and others, is very interesting.
Twice in the last three months or so, I’ve posted in the same vein, albeit with much less specificity, prompted by the heavy promotion of the toolbar, and the default-on insertion of ads for the Google Clips feature in the Google Reader (admittedly, the second being a minor, minor issue in terms of traffic and thus money).
All of this atypical — and “UnGoogly” — behavior amounts to one of two things: that they’re worried about maintaining expected levels of growth; or that they’re dead set on cranking out as much revenue per page, damn the “Do No Evil” mantra.
I continue to think that the worry is focused on the middle quarters of 2006, based on projected trendlines and the market’s expectations for growth to justify the whopper P/E. My gut tells me we’ll see another stellar quarterly report from Google for Q405, but that their pronouncements about the coming year will be the most interesting to parse.
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[...] This is not to say GOOG is going down the drain, or a bad company. It’s clearly the healthiest, best, most important Internet company right now. But it does seem to confirm my earlier suspicions they were worried about their growth, and that it wasn’t strong enough to meet the market’s incredible expectations given the share price. [...]
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