Google CEO Larry Page can be forgiven for being in a bad mood this weekend. On his company's Q1 2014 earnings call, his people delivered what he thought would be good news: revenues of $15.4 billion, up 19%. Very, very few business can deliver 20% growth on billions in revenues. By any measure, Google is on fire as a company. Yet investors hated it. They sold the stock, and it declined 5% immediately after the call. In 24 hours the price had lost $9, from $544 per share to $536. Google is growing, for sure. But, counterintuitively, it is not growing at the same time, as the following charts show. From a macro perspective, Google is boxed in by two factors: The available population on the Internet and the population on the mobile portion of the Internet. Google — according to numbers from Asymco, the quant-y tech analysts — may not be growing so much as it is merely floating in place on a rising tide of humanity. Unfortunately for Google, that tide is about to go out. Intern...
