Sunday, October 21, 2012

The good, the bad and the ugly: The truth about Google's horrible, no good, very bad day


The premature release of disappointing earnings wasn't the only slip-up made by the search giant.

Fortune Magazine  reports: Did you hear about Google's premature announcement? No, not the mid-morning earnings release, hours ahead of schedule, which sent Google shares plummeting 9% before trading had to be halted on the Nasdaq.

On Thursday Google suffered from another untimely leak. As I sat inside Google's San Francisco office listening to a presentation on the company's new Chromebook laptop, which was to be publicly unveiled later in the day, I googled "Chromebook" and the first result that came up was the product page for the still secret device. Oops.  The new Samsung Chromebook, as this device is called, looks a bit like an "ultra-book." It is elegant, light (2.5 pounds), thin (0.8 inches) and is said to have a long battery life (6.5 hours)....Best of all, it is priced at just $249. All that makes it far more attractive than earlier, bulkier models, whose prices started at $349 and up. Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome at Google, said the pricing would allow families to use them as extra machines to have around the house......

There is no guarantee that the new Chromebook, which goes on sale Monday, will be a hit. But it's bound to look attractive when compared to competing devices running new versions of Microsoft (MSFT) Windows, which will be more expensive. ……

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