Google has just released results for its second quarter of 2014 today. It made revenues of $15.96 billion, a 22 percent increase over the same period last year. It made $3.42 billion in net income, which is slightly down quarter over quarter. It's a miss from analyst expectations on income, though revenue is slightly better than expected. Google's chief business officer, Nikesh Arora, will also be leaving the company to go work for SoftBank. He'll be replaced by Omid Kordestani, who CEO Larry Page describes as "one of my closest advisors."
Most analysts weren't expecting big news from Google today, and the collective shrug at the company's trend over the past couple of quarters culminated in disappointment over last quarter. The most important struggle for Google is beginning to look remarkably like what Facebook has been contending with, namely increasing both revenue and profit on mobile advertising. Google has been moving in the right direction recently, thanks in no small part to Android's dominant global marketshare in mobile ads. Ads are certainly Google's best way of monetizing mobile right now — App Annie's latest numbers have Google Play app download exceeding iOS by 60 percent, but Apple still earns 80 percent more revenue.
The results come off the heels of Google's massive I/O developer conference. It's much too soon for anything that happened in that conference to have a major effect on the company, however. The only consumer product it released that's worth noting is Android Wear. But Google did announce many initiatives that could be hugely important down the the line, including the Android One program could help push high-quality Android handsets into developing markets and Android TV could finally signal that Google knows what it's doing in the living room. Neither product is actually shipping yet, however.
But Google's biggest announcement of the last quarter is that the company is developing its own self-driving car. Obviously we won't know what kind of effect it will have on Google for some time. The company's prospects may not change wildly in the near or even medium term, but the self-driving car is just one of many huge, long-term bets that could position the company to dominate new industries in the far future — assuming any of them actually pan out.
Usually the most interesting parts of Google's quarterly earnings don't come from the numbers, but from executive comments on the call. We'll be listening live for news at 4:30 ET, and you can do so as well.