Google stock hanging in there

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Google stock has been hanging in there, but you almost have to wonder how much longer. Google has been busy releasing a stunning array of products, none of which appear to be gaining traction. With the share price as high as it is, any stumble could be fatal for Google, but so far they haven’t taken one.

With the stock abover $410, Google needs to increase revenues and earnings at a great pace. They have a chance to do so, but there is stiff competition in every segment they compete in. The search industry has both MSN and Yahoo working frantically to take market share from them. MSN and Yahoo are both aiming directly at Google’s AdSense program, hoping to carve revenue streams of their own, and hurt Google in the process.

Google looks like a company living off hype and hoping to luck out on a new product release. This would help keep the stock high, as Google lives primarily off the hype. But if any bad news or sentiments slip into the stock, a fall from glory is highly probably. Very few companies have ever commanded a market cap as large as Google’s on revenues like theirs. They’ll be able to keep the stock price going up as long as the innovations start to hit.

Google is investing big in mobile devices, and that might be the area that saves them. If they can stay ahead of the technology out there, they have a chance of hitting another one out of the park. Their investors are assuredly rooting for this.

Google needs an innovation fast. Eric Schmidt has been aggressive as CEO of Google and he speaks of Google as being serial innovators. But outside of search, they haven’t had any big hits lately. In social networking, they’re being crushed by both News Corps MySpace and Yahoo with Flicker and Delicious. Their understated interface seems to be losing ground to the more advanced Yahoo UI, and they haven’t been able to penetrate the social networking space nearly as well as they thought.

Right now, much of Google looks like a hobbled together collection of parts. They run businesses from domain forwarding, registration, advertising, free email, and dozens of other experiments, with many of the projects achieving only a small degree of visibility. Many of their online products look unfinished.

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