Google's 10-K Treasure Trove
Google is the world’s leading search engine but the company is quickly earning a reputation for holding its strategic cards close to the chest. As a result, its 10-K filing with the SEC is a treasure trove of information. The overall tone of the 10-K is aggressive investing to maintain Google’s market dominance. Capital spending this year will be US$500 million, compared with $319 million in 2004. So where’s Google going to spend all this dough? Most of it will be focused on internal projects such as video, desktop search, comparative shopping, blogs, e-mail and localization that complement its search technology. A good example of this plan is storage as the number of Gmail users grows when the “beta” program is completed. Speaking of Gmail and storage, Google has doubled the e-mail service’s storage capacity to 2GB - countering Yahoo’s recent move to 1GB from 250MB. For people who think Google will be knocked off its perch any time soon, it is clear that Google will go down without an expensive fight.
