Thread by @QuinnyPig

And now, the Alphabet (Google's parent company) earnings call. It's the rarest of unicorns: a YouTube video that doesn't whine at me to upgrade to YouTube Premium.

The market is happy. Stock up 7.5% in after hours trading.

A 20 for 1 stock split coming this summer.

Let's look at the @googlecloud numbers.

Google Cloud showed $5.5B revenue for the quarter, or a $22 billion annual run rate.

Margins are less rosy; for the quarter they lost just shy of $10 million a day.

The Google powerhouse is and remains ads ($61.24 billion in revenue for the quarter), which is probably why the @googlecloud console has a DoubleClick tracker in it.

"New computers aren't worth the money" says Google, much as many of us have given recent Intel roadmap lapses.

The conference call is started. Unlike Amazon, Alphabet/Google pulls the completely amateur-hour move of having their CEO @sundarpichai deign to show up for the call.

Talking about YouTube Shorts, which is trying to be TikTok Pantsed. It's making money apparently.

Now he's talking about cloud. @googlecloud revenue grew 44% YoY. most of the $50b revenue backlog is attributed to Cloud. (Well yeah. 10 year deal signings will do that!)

Their sales force has tripled over the last few years. Snark away, I find those jokes kinda tired.

Doubled third party sales through their cloud marketplace (full spend counts towards customer spend commitments, vs. only 50% on @awscloud).

"Our open multi-cloud infrastructure" blah blah blah.

It means I can get a better management experience for my AWS environment, if executed properly. Not sure this benefits Google much, but I'll take it.

He closes his prepared remarks by thanking his employees. This is the kind of thing I mean when I say Google focuses Amazon's customer obsession towards its employees.

"The future of retail is omnichannel," says Philipp Schindler (Google's CBO (Chief Bitcoin Officer)).

Meanwhile a product manager elsewhere begins drafting a doc for Amazon Basics OmniChannel.

Question time! Starts with a web3 question.

"We pay attention to innovation and we want to support it. We're keeping an eye on it" because PONZl.com isn't a Google property but there's no sense insulting people unnecessarily.

"How are you hiring in the current labor market?"

By paying people decently, mainly. It's not THAT hard.

I used to think that these calls avoided cloud topics because the analysts were shortsighted, but now I think it's because they legitimately don't understand the space. They don't understand other spaces either, but they can pretend otherwise with retail or ad sales.

And thus ends the call. Now, my take!

I think Google Cloud losing money is the right play. They're not setting that money on fire, they're investing in the platform's growth. They VERY OBVIOUSLY have enough money coming in from search / ads / turning off Reader to subsidize Cloud forever.

I think it's naive in the extreme to view the industry as a zero sum game. Growth is very often net new, not "we convinced Customer X to migrate from another cloud."

And I'm very grateful for antitrust laws because otherwise AWS and Google would team up to show even more ads in the AWS console than we already have.