From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Turns out Google’s investors are as maddeningly difficult to impress as the company’s founders themselves. After market close Wednesday, the search giant announced fourth-quarter profits that nearly tripled, handily beating analysts’ expectations, but astonishingly not those of investors. Though it was nearly impossible to find anything worrisome in Google’s numbers, disappointed investors sold the stock off anyway. (Oh, I suppose company’s growth is clearly slowing; it was ONLY 70 percent year over year. Talk about letdowns …). Google is trading at $494.44 as I write this — off nearly 2 percent. This, despite a $1.03 billion profit on a 67 percent jump in revenues, to $3.2 billion. Said Scott Devitt, an analyst with Stifel, Nicolaus, “Expectations got ahead of themselves.”

Yes, just a little, I think. “Their performance is extraordinary even in absolute terms,” Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Derek Brown told the New York Times, “but particularly in comparison with the companies they are competing with.”