Michael Gracie

Whose estimates are we talking about?

Google’s second quarter earnings fell short of Wall Street estimates, and by Friday’s end the stock had fallen almost 10%. The reaction…

• The New York Times says Google’s miss was deliberate, and they’ve now “gone too far” (i.e. someone’s pointing fingers - no surprise there)
• Om Malik says Silicon Valley has reason to worry (he probably has a good point nonetheless)

and

• Henry Blodget outs another nutbag fund manager who’s touting a $1,000 price target (while buying all the way down at the expense of his investors)

Meanwhile, some are calling it a “rare miss” and others say it wasn’t a miss at all. I wonder.

All the fiddling with “charges” aside, according to the consensus estimates retrieved from Bloomberg some months ago, Google hasn’t hit “the numbers” in a while:

What’s the big deal?

To few numbers, me says. You have to inundate in order to confuse.

YouTube was about to make Google a extra 3/4 of a billion in net revenue, but the analyst’s estimate was off by a factor of 1,000. Now Mary Meeker & Co. have corrected their minuscule error, and changed the assumptions so they don’t wind up with a minuscule result.

Does this mean Bear Stearn’s estimate of Facebook’s value is really five to six million?