Google announced this morning that the company will soon have a new person filling the CFO role. Ruth Porat, who currently serves as chief financial officer at the finance firm Morgan Stanley, will take over for Patrick Pichette starting May 26th. “I look forward to learning from Ruth as we continue to innovate in our core–from search and ads, to Android, Chrome and YouTube–as well as invest in a thoughtful, disciplined way in our next generation of big bets,” Google CEO Larry Page said in the announcement. Expand Expanding Close
Google has reached a settlement with former Morgan Stanley banker Daniel Hegglin who sued the tech company behind negative Internet posts that had an impact on his public reputation. The Hong Kong-based businessman took his case to Britain’s High Court to have Google remove web search content falsely identifying him as a murderer, nazi and a pedophile.
What might be interesting here is that if you negate Google and Apple’s cash on hand, the Market caps of the two companies are pretty close. Expand Expanding Close
The ongoing Oracle v. Google trial is churning up some doozies regarding the history of Android, and this latest one is almost unbelievable: Google projected to sell roughly 10 million Android tablets a year for 2011 and 2012 while seizing a third of the marketshare.
A presentation by former Android Inc. CEO Andy Rubin in July 2010, exhibited during the trial, revealed those hefty figures. Obviously, Google’s view was a little optimistic, especially because the search engine also expected Android tablets to reap $110 million in search revenue for 2011 and $220 million for 2012.
The company’s ballpark figures derived from a then-current Morgan Stanley estimate that placed the tablet market around 46 million units for 2012. Needless to say, Google missed its target. Rubin admitted last February that only 12 million Android tablets sold in the previous two years. Apple, on the other hand, has a stronghold on the market with over 67 million iPads sold, of which 11.8 million moved in Q2 2012 alone.
Today’s two-year-old slide deck is significant, because it unearthed the first-ever Android revenue numbers, as well as early user-interface designs for Android 3.0 Honeycomb.