The Freight Train That Is Android. March 24, 2011: March 24, 2011: [Follow Me on Twitter] “People get ready, there’s a train a comin’” - The Impressions From Zacks via Yahoo: Mark Vickery, On Thursday March 24, 2011, 4:58 pm EDT “BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (NasdaqGS: RIMM – News) beat its fiscal 4Q EPS estimates by 2 cents per share, but missed slightly on quarterly revenues and offered guidance well below the current consensus.
This has sent RIMM shares down nearly 10% in after-market trading…” Yesterday, after the market closed, Research in Motion, the makers of the Blackberry device, announced that they would be lowering their current quarter earnings due to lower average sales prices. Despite all that has been written about Android, as well as its unquestionable early success, the world at large still doesn’t fully appreciate the raw power of this juggernaut. One of Warren Buffet’s most famous quotes is that “In business, I look for economic castles protected by unbreachable ‘moats’.”
Firefox a handsome fee. Search Is Google's Castle, Everything Else Is A Moat. Google is moving in many directions—mobile, browsers, productivity apps, operating systems, social.
At first glance, it may seem like it is trying ever so hard to move beyond its giant one-trick pony: search. What people keep forgetting is that it is a pretty good trick. Benchmark Capital VC Bill Gurley reminds us how good this trick is in an excellent post that looks at Google’s market expansion strategy not as one of a series of aggressive offensives, but rather a highly defensive strategy. Warren Buffet famously describes the best businesses as “economic castles protected by unbreachable ‘moats.’” Search is Google’s economic castle (perhaps with other forms of online advertising such as display thrown in there), and everything else is a moat trying to protect that castle.
Gurley goes further and says not only does Google build moats around itself, but then it scorches the earth surrounding the moat: So here is the kicker. It is time to stop thinking of Google as a Search company - Google 24/7 -Fortune Tech. Image by holisticmonkey via Flickr In a post last week entitled The Freight Train That Is Android, Benchmark Capital General Partner Bill Gurly explains the unprecedented success of Android as a defense, or "moat" around Google's (GOOG) castle.
One of Warren Buffet's most famous quotes is that, "In business, I look for economic castles protected by unbreachable 'moats'. " An "economic castle" is a great business, and the "unbreachable moat" is the strategy or market dynamic that heightens the barriers-to-entry and makes it difficult or ideally impossible to compete with, or gain access to, the economic castle. . .For Google, the economic castle is clearly the search business, augmented by its amazing AdWords monetization framework.
The post is spot on in almost every sense. But I have one issue... Just about everyone still thinks of Google as a search company. Google doesn't derive nearly 90% of its revenues from search. YouTube: Google's 3 YouTube tricks: 1. Warren Buffett on castles and moats by Matt Linderman of 37signals.