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look at freaking Microsoft Microsoft is still a money making machine unbel they're built off Windows and office yeah products from the '90s yeah still milking those 80s 80s I me it's it it's so mindboggling to me that that people can at the same time recognize oh that's true Google same thing
just as Apple was in need of very Desperate Measures
the only sort of story I've seen that played out and worked was the Steve Jobs returning to Apple they had a very sprawling product line and what did he say we're going to make four products make a laptop for consumers a laptop for pros a desktop for consumers and a desktop for pros boom that's it let's get to work right yeah um and they cut out all the stuff even cut out things that were um profitable somewhat I'm sure they accountings printers yeah yeah all the cameras new blah blah blah blah
Yahoo actually continues to make money ... still they have what 700 million people somehow using the services so take that into consideration as well right it's not the same situation it's not like they're just bleeding money um left and right they have a problem with with Focus
Yahoo is in need of Desperate Measures at least from a company culture perspective
you go in and there's 10 11,000 people working on how many unique projects yep it's 500
the problems that Yahoo faces right now are the things you need to solve you need to have Clarity you need to make people feel like the work that they're doing actually matters and it's going somewhere
Amazon wrote their investment down to like nothing
Salesforce definitely gets points for that concept absolutely uh of renting the software whatever
you can look at another company like Salesforce I keep picking on Salesforce because I think that they're one of the most egregious violators of this in terms of accounting Shenanigans and they can just go on their merry away and like nobody gives a damn right because it has growth and it has earnings even though it doesn't have earnings it has growth yeah and it has revenues but so do all these other things right
there companies that continue to amaze me in how they defy the gravity of the market was this uh LinkedIn Salesforce other companies like that that are in my mind like the same kinds of companies in that there
Salesforce I think is a perfect example they keep pulling the same sort of accounting schemes where oh let's not count uh stock compensation for example even though it's a huge chunk of of our expenses we're going to sort of push that off the books and then we're going to publish these numbers saying we were profitable
it felt like to me like they just put the rock the thrusters on full blast to get public and they just spent all their jet fuel where they could have just gone at 55 mil hour 65 miles an hour instead of trying to floor it to get to the finish line and they would have actually been able to just manage that profitability issue or they would have figured out earlier at less expense that this was not a sustainable model
I think that that's unfortunately the conclusion because it's not just Groupon if you look at Living Social I mean it's a [ __ ] show too
what feels icky is when somebody then says well let's just saddle all that risk on the public markets and I'm going to take my $350 million and just kick back right because then like that just doesn't feel right especially when the business actually needs that money like the business continues to hammer money and certainly was at the time they needed that 800 million or whatever it was that got cashed out and maybe that would have saved them
what the thinking was Let's Take the Money and Run if you look at how that deal went down what happened just before the IPO billion dollar private exactly that that people just cashed out and took the money and ran
they could have avoided it too couldn't they have if they just said let's grow a little bit slower we don't need to be the fastest growing business ever
what I don't like about all this sort of media tension on it is that nobody pulls up these stories they don't run through the numbers they don't look at the consequences of the business until the business already looks like it's failing
the local business was giving up 75% 775 cents on every dollar no way for them to make money and they're going to get the worst customers right and they're going to be stigmatized as a failing business
they're trying all these other things now to sort of pivot the business is into selling goods and so forth but that's just a different kind of business the only reason they're doing that is because the core thing that people invested in [ __ ]
the core thing that people invested in [ __ ] like the daily deals business of offering 50% off just doesn't scale even though it sounds intuitively like it should have right
costing them $143 to make a dollar right and it's not getting any cheaper the mechanics did not make any sense they were already at Great scale it didn't make any sense at that scale
I think they were valued at $ 228 billion right yeah I now they're at three in market cap and what Google off 25 billion dollar disappeared right in in market cap
companies like Salesforce like Groupon get away with basically discarding those numbers and saying oh yeah here the Gap numbers pay no attention to them here are the numbers I want you to see which are the [ __ ] numbers that where we deduct all sorts of things that make no sense in that came back to bite Groupon in a major way
kuon tried to do that with marketing expenses right it was the biggest joke ever oh if you don't count all the money we have to spend to acquire customers we're actually profitable well they were sort of saying let's spend let's take that $100 a cost require and push it out over 5ye lifespan it was ridiculous
Groupon had amazing real Revenue the issue is not getting Revenue it's getting money you can keep the earnings exactly it's all about earnings um as Groupon showed if you're willing to spend a140 to buy a dollar you can buy a lot of dollars right there's there's a lot of that on the table a little bit like a pump and dump
the ones that the market found out about like group on and zing so on where they were like we were so excited about this for about 5 minutes and then we actually looked at the numbers and they were like holy [ __ ] this looks horrible right