GOOGL - Alphabet Wants Everyone To Focus On Just Two Letters A And I -- But I Won't Do That
2024-06-13 13:53:44 ET
Summary
- Alphabet sees itself as an AI company.
- It isn’t… It’s really an advertising company.
- I worry about companies that mis-perceive their own businesses.
- Even so, I recognize that it has too many fans to justify a Sell recommendation.
- So I say Hold but with a very tight trailing stop loss.
“Who do we serve?”
HB, then head of the Multex.com consumer group, posed that question in 2000. This is how he meant to launch a strategy confab involving the group’s flagship asset, MultexInvestor.com.
(Don’t try to look up either URL. They are, and have long been, defunct.)
That seemed easy. So, I just blurted out… “We serve investors.”
Oh, my God.
Have you ever been in a crowded conference room in which everybody else is simultaneously jumping down your throat and treating you as if you were the biggest idiot on the planet? Trust me if you haven’t. It’s not pretty.
That hullabaloo ended with the group’s having driven home to me what to them was the obvious point. “We don’t care about investors. We serve our sponsors and advertisers.”
That turned out to be an unfortunate corporate identity crisis.
The team exercised its right to not care about investors. Investors exercised a reciprocal right to not care about, or visit, MultexInvestor.com.
Sponsors and advertisers wound up with little or no traffic and monetary return on their spending. So, they went away. And eventually, ditto MultexInvestor.com.
Now, suppose Alphabet's (GOOG) (GOOG:CA) (GOOGL) top brass were to hold a similar gathering and open by asking “What’s our top priority?”...
Alphabet Wants Everyone To Focus On Just Two Letters, A And I -- But I Won't Do That