Thread by @QuinnyPig

All right, Twitter. I promised you a treat today, and I think this thread will deliver in at least one dimension.

I'm going to teach you how I make popcorn.

Stovetop is my goto.

Half a cup of kernels, plus a teaspoon and a half of coconut oil.

Trust me on that one. It's the best oil.

I love the whirlypop. Don’t @ me. Turn on a low to medium heat unless you want to scorch it. The coconut oil melts basically instantly.

Toss in a couple of kernels. When they pop, it’s time to go.

Separately, melt half a stick of butter. The secret is to brown it.

There we go. Time to dump in the kernels and get to stirring.

Kitchen trivia: “risotto” is Italian for “keep stirring.”

Let's talk salt.

You want small, finely ground grains. Otherwise it won't stick to the popcorn and is just disappointing. I like sea salt, but to each their own.

This is Twitter; if there's one thing you people are world-class experts in, it's salt.

The butter is ready. Yum.

Pour the popcorn in a bowl. Pour over the butter while shaking. Sprinkle salt; less is more. You can always add more!

Now that the popcorn is ready, it's time to watch something lighthearted and fun while you much upon it. I choose @google's 2020 Q1 earnings call.

That's right; this is now an investor call livetweet thread.

The live webcast lives at , but I'm more entertaining.

Alphabet's revenue slowed to 13% from 17% over Q1, which is impressive given the pandemic. It's also disturbing, as to maintain it they're going to have to do increasingly monstrous things.

Cloud Revenue is $2.78 billion which is... not terrific compared to market leader AWS and challenger Azure.

The hold music on the call is "Lightened" by Shima33, showing why Google YouTube Music Whatever This Month isn't really mentioned in the same conversations as @spotify and @AppleMusic.

And we start with a video set to inspiring music usually reserved for guilt-tripping you into adopting a puppy, highlighting the pandemic.

Now a hold slide while we wait. Google wasn't just late to the cloud thing, it's now late to the investor thing.

Somehow there are 15 thousand people watching this live.

Whoa. 83% of Alphabet's earnings comes from ads. That's going to be a problem next quarter.

And we're starting! Jim Friedland, Alphabet's Director of Investor Relations reads the Safe Harbor disclaimer. It's like the depressing kickoff to Passover.

Then hands the call off to @sundarpichai.

"The world has changed incredibly since our last call" he says. Unlike when he normally says it, he's not talking about some weird Google product they're about to deprecate, but rather COVID19.

He's still talking about COVID19. Usually this level of "talking about something that isn't your company on an earnings call" is reserved for Larry Ellison's ranting about Amazon.

He's going to cover four areas:
1. How they're helping with COVID19
2. How people are using Google products during COVID19
3. Talk about their businesses
4. Discuss their investment plan and focus for the rest of 2020.

"You've heard about our partnership on contact tracing with Apple in a way that preserves users' privacy" says Sundar, the word "privacy" feeling strange and alien in his mouth.

He's still going on about how much Google is helping.

I've gotta say, their wrapping themselves in "COVID19 as marketing opportunity" feels disgusting.

"Meanwhile, YouTube subscriptions have continued to grow" says @sundarpichai, stressing an already bursting healthcare system by giving all 22.6K listeners severe whiplash.

Now talking about how very proud he is of his staff. Presumably he means the ones that aren't attempting to organize.

"Our non-advertising lines are demonstrating strong growth, particularly Google Cloud."

That's a $130 million increase, presumably due to now charging for GKE.

"Marketing expenses have grown over the past quarter" which is fascinating. Google Ads weren't enough of a marketing vehicle?

Now talking about how many shares they've repurchased. In other words, "the best thing we found to invest in was returning the money to shareholders." Well all right then!

It's pretty clear that these divisions don't talk to each other. YouTube has 683 million views for Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up," but @killedbygoogle continues to deprecate things with wild abandon.

"@gcpcloud growth was far higher than the growth of our Cloud segment overall" but we're not going to break it out because that would be revealing some things we'd rather die than talk about in public.

$5.7 billion in capex for the quarter, primarily in datacenter and other real estate.

YES. Say what you will about Google, but they're certainly investing in infrastructure.

Now UBS asks questions about YouTube.

(Most of these analyst questions will be on the giant revenue businesses, not their cloudy science project.)

JP Morgan asks: "How does Alphabet come out strong from this downturn? And because I'm wedging a second question in here, justify your expenses."

Man, I listen to some of these questions and wonder why I'm not invited to these calls. My questions are at least, y'know. Germane.

The analysts are beating them up on not having better plans to invest all of their money.

I have trouble relating.

"We're seeing significant traction on G-Suite" but of course that gets rolled into the "Cloud" segment so we don't know how much of that growth is GCP, G-Suite, or something else weird.

Google and Amazon both have the same problem: their other, larger revenue business (ecommerce on one, monetizing creepy on the other) blows out all real discussion of their cloud offerings outside of tech circles.

Wow, a cloud question!

"What could the benefits of cloud be as we move past COVID19? Work from home, etc?"

Managed to get through the answer without mentioning "Zoom." Good work!

They're predicting a CapEx decline, but are careful to bound it to office buildings, NOT datacenters.

"We're cutting CapEx investment" without qualification would be read correctly as "we're giving up on cloud."

"Me complaining that they're not asking enough questions about a business unit that's 6% of their revenue" feels reminiscent of "complaining about the developer environment portion of your @awscloud bill."

And that concludes this thread. Now for me to go write and publish something about a different cloud provider than you might expect.

But trust me on the browning of the butter.