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A comment on Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead. Parent comment

Re:Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense,... by wslh on Friday August 16, 2013 @10:03AM (#6224016)
It boggles my mind, given the big money involved, why so many people continue to bet huge sums of cash on the proven short-term penny-wise/pound-foolish idiocy of MBA-think.

This is the con of being a public company: a lot of cynicism. Imagine that you have inside information that Blackberry will revolutionize the mobile market, you will put money in their stocks and may be move on fast once it increases significantly the price. Yes, value investing is very interesting but how many daily transactions are based on this thinking?

I think there was a lot of bias in favor of public companies and now we are realizing that staying private may be the best option if you think long term and don't want to deal with massive conflict of interest.

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Re:Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense,... by api on Friday August 16, 2013 @10:25AM (#6224147)
I've had a speculation for a while that this is why Google, Apple, and many other tech giants like to keep their stock float small and thus their stock price per share very high. I wonder if it's a way of trying to select for longer-term investors. ???
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Re:Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense,... by wslh on Friday August 16, 2013 @10:33AM (#6224210)
I am not sure because you can own half of an stock. For example if you invest in ETFs you don't an integer number of stocks.
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Re:Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense,... by dscb on Friday August 16, 2013 @11:00AM (#6224370)
The shares of stock in an EFT are controlled by an independent group. Essentially you are buying shares of someone else's shares.
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Re:Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense,... by wslh on Friday August 16, 2013 @11:12AM (#6224441)
But this is a way to operate on fractional stocks. Can you elaborate on "api" original speculation?
[ Parent | on HN ]