You know your company is having a good year when its first-quarter profits top $1 billion. And that’s exactly how Google kicked off 2007, by pulling in revenues of $3.66 billion for the quarter ending in March.
While we may have joked back in April 2006 that Google could afford to pay $1 billion to advertise on the lunar surface, in 2007 that was definitely true.
And in a way the company is doing something similar by putting up a total of $30 million towards the Google Lunar X Prize to encourage international teams to land a privately funded spacecraft on the Moon. Well, the company has already mapped the stars.
While Google can obviously afford a few frivolous activities, it didn’t take its business eye off the ball in 2007. Its most audacious move came at the expense of its biggest rival: Microsoft.
Microsoft was known to be in talks to buy ad tracking firm DoubleClick, valuing the company at $2 billion.
The buyout would have given Microsoft access to DoubleClick’s Dart technology, which monitors how Internet adverts perform, boosting Redmond’s ability to fight Google for online advertising market share.
A brilliant plan, except for the part where Google sneaked in and bought DoubleClick for itself.
The deal is naturally being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission over competition worries following complaints from Microsoft.
Germany is also questioning the buyout over user privacy fears, putting the $3.1 billion deal under threat.
Even if the DoubleClick deal does eventually come unstuck, Google has plenty of irons in plenty of other fires.
For starters there’s the rumored Google phone, a device that became much more likely when the company applied for a patent.
What Google eventually released was a mobile software platform called ‘Android’ that should have applications running on it by the second half of 2008.
Google claims that Android, which is…