30 Boxes, we hardly knew ya

Today TechCrunch showed off some screenshots from the much rumored Google Calendar — woefully dubbed CL2. The other online calendars are going to have a tough time when Google muscles into their turf.

From a quick look at the screenshots, the calendar looks pretty hot. Nothing like the (IMHO) awful over-AJAXed Google Reader RSS feed reader. More slick, and more, what’s the word, conventional. Anyone that’s used Outlook or any other calendaring app is going to feel right at home here.

The GMail integration is going to be great, as well. This will make GMail the place to hold all your contacts and communications with others. Google also has lots of opportunities for advertising to you. If they integrate something like Yahoo’s upcoming.org (social network meets calendaring), and toss in some paid local event advertising, it could be something that users really lap up.

Looking at Om Malik’s list of details for CL2, the last two are seriously hot. Syncing with desktops and sending SMS alerts? Nice. Toss in some Flagr.com love, shake and stir, and Google Mobile becomes something even more useful.

As an aside, let me say that I’m always impressed at the “journalist” bloggers out there that spend so much time and effort digging up this kind of news. I don’t have time for that, so that’s why you get the link-blog action shown here.

As a final aside, Google astounds me. Shades of the dot-com boom. Check out the GOOG market cap. As of this writing, it’s sitting pretty at $104.59B.

Now shoot on over to BusinessWeek’s Top 50 for 2005 and sort by market cap. Wow, GOOG comes in between Wells Fargo and AT&T (prior to recent mergers, of course — but that’s another article). Close by are giant companies like Coke, Pepsi, Intel, IBM, JP Morgan Chase, Wal Mart.

Wow. But look at the P/E! GOOG == 70.48 today. Coke == 20.74, AT&T== 18.88, Wells Fargo == 14.32… you get the idea. Interesting.

Talk amongst yourselves.

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Published:: 3.8.06 / 6pm

Category:: Internet

Andy 3.9.06 / 6am

Such a high P/E suggests that the stock is still way, way overpriced, particularly in comparison to the three other P/E’s you cite which are all extremely well established companies in extremely well-established markets. We collectively still don’t know how to price something like Google.

Many “experts” thought the Google share price would bottom out in the first few weeks after the IPO. Those folks (which included me, incidentally) groused that the investment bankers were essentially robbing the public blind with that shares auction they had, and that the public’s money was just funneling into their hands. (Of course, it also funneled into the hands of the Google owners, which we didn’t mind nearly as much.)

Eventually, a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money on Google. History shows not a single company that maintained such a distorted P/E ad infinitum. Eventually, Google is going to be measurable in the way that all public companies are measurable. They are going to make money is ways that seem familiar and they will be directly comparable. The price is going to have to come back to reality, and that market cap will drop down from triple digits to double digits (or possibly single digits..!)

The real question, that which cannot be answered, is when? It might not happen for 20 years. But I would guess it’s less than 5 years away.

Narendra 3.11.06 / 2pm

come on. big companies produce generally boring stuff.

and yeah, we’ve got sms notifications AND invitations already

mark 3.11.06 / 9pm

Narendra -

Right on. Here’s hoping that GOOG doesn’t force 30boxes out of the calendaring biz. I’ve not been a huge fan of the Google “diversification”, or their huge variety of applications, so here’s rooting for “the little guy”.

Thanks for commenting.

mark

Braddock 3.11.06 / 9pm

Wells Fargo has CAPITAL.
AT&T has INFRASTRUCTURE, 100 some years worth of it.
What exactly does Google have? Mindshare???

Mindshare will be the first to go in the apocalypse.
Plenty of people will still want to make phone calls to rich bankers right up to the second coming though.

randomnoise

30 Boxes, we hardly knew ya

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