Today, Alphabet beat Q3 earnings projections.
During the earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai took the (micro)phone (for the first time) to discuss the business and product highlights from the quarter. It was a pleasant addition after a strong showing at last month’s hardware event.
“There is a real sense of energy and focus throughout the company,” he said. He pointed towards momentum seen in Google’s main products, including Search, Maps and YouTube, which have over a billion users each. Google Play, which Pichai calls a “thriving hub,” has joined that group.
The broad mission of “organizing the world’s information” gives the company a lot of room to be successful, Pichai admitted.
Pichai also highlighted Google’s strength in machine learning, referring to its ability as “state of the art,” calling out Google Now and Google Photos, two products that are gaining quite a bit of momentum. Photos just announced that it hit the 100 million user mark.
Additionally, Pichai says that Marshmallow is the “most successful release” for Android operating systems to date. Android has gone from 1 billion to 1.4 billion over the past year, he shared during Q&A.
Pichai says Google is focusing on “micro moments,” actions that users take throughout the day on their mobile phones. Be it viewing content or buying something, Google is digging in to track every… little… move… and signal. That’s the kind of “focus” Pichai is referring to.
Mobile search revenue was a standout reason for its strong showing, according to CFO Ruth Porat. Pichai noted that search results now include over 100 billion deep links from within other apps, something that will help continue to grow its advertising business off of the desktop. Pichai says that his long-term view is that mobile search could be a better experience than that of desktop. Tall order, especially with ad blocking being a big topic again.
On mobile, this time. On that, Pichai said “it’s not a new phenomenon” and “we as an industry have to do better” to get ads right and out of users’ way, sharing the responsibility with publishers.
“Internally, all of our objectives are primarily focused on mobile,” Pichai stated in a way that’s refreshingly forward. There’s no guessing here, it’s mobile or broke for Google right now in a lot of ways; search, hardware, cloud and more. Pichai didn’t get a gimme to run; he’s taking the company into the next millennium.
