Thursday was one of those afternoons where you refresh Twitter every ninety seconds because something is clearly happening and nobody has explained it yet. Around 12:30 in the afternoon, Google's Q3 numbers hit the wires, hours before they were supposed to. The earnings call wasn't even scheduled until 4:30. Somebody at RR Donnelley, the printer Google uses to file paperwork with the SEC, hit publish on a document that was never supposed to go out until the market closed, and just like that, GOOG was falling off a cliff in real time while half of Wall Street was still eating lunch.
I want to be clear about how weird this is. Companies like Google spend enormous amounts of money making sure information like this doesn't leak a single minute early, because a minute early is worth actual dollars to people trading on it. And the thing that broke wasn't some hacker, it wasn't a disgruntled employee, it was a print vendor fat-fingering a filing. NASDAQ ended up halting trading in the stock, not once but twice, because the swings were too violent to let the market keep going. By the time the actual call happened at 4:30 like planned, the stock had already dropped something like nine percent and everybody on the call knew it, and you could hear it in how careful Patrick Pichette was being with every sentence.
The numbers themselves weren't great, revenue was up but profit missed what analysts wanted, partly thanks to Motorola dragging things down since Google bought them last year. But honestly the bad quarter is only half the story I care about. What I keep coming back to is how fragile this whole system is. In 2012 we still route material nonpublic information about a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars through an outside print shop that formats SEC filings, the same kind of company that's been doing this job since long before anyone had a website. Nobody thinks about that part of the pipeline until it breaks, and then everyone acts shocked that it could break at all.
I've worked around enough corporate comms stuff at my old job to know that "the printer did it" is a real, boring, completely believable explanation, and that's almost the funniest part. Everyone wanted a juicier story today, a leak, a mole, something. Nope. Just a filing that went out before someone hit the button they meant to hit. I don't think there's a villain here, I just think it's a good reminder that a lot of the systems that move markets are held together with the software equivalent of duct tape and a guy named Gary who's been doing this since 1994.
Also, can we talk for a second about how the leaked document reportedly still had some incomplete placeholder text sitting in it, right where a quote was supposed to go? I've seen a few different secondhand descriptions of it going around today and I don't trust myself to repeat the exact wording, but even the loose version, a half finished sentence sitting in a legal filing that then gets read by every trading desk in the country within minutes, is the kind of thing that makes you laugh and wince at the same time. Whoever proofread that doc on a normal Thursday had a very different Thursday than they expected.
Unrelated, but also eating up my brain this week: I still haven't stopped thinking about Felix Baumgartner jumping out of a balloon at 128,000 feet last Sunday. That's not really what this post is about, I just needed to say it somewhere. Watching a guy go supersonic with his own body, live, on a stream that apparently peaked at something like 8 million concurrent viewers, is one of those things where the tech angle, the stream mostly held up, is almost beside the point next to the sheer insanity of the stunt itself.
And speaking of things everyone is whispering about instead of confirming, Apple's invites went out earlier this week for something happening next Tuesday, the 23rd. The card just says "we've got a little more to show you," which is either the most Apple sentence ever written or the least informative one, hard to say which. I'll believe whatever it turns out to be when I see it and not a day before.
Keep an eye on GOOG tomorrow. I'd guess it claws some of that back once the initial panic wears off, but I'm not a trader and you shouldn't take stock advice from a blog that just spent three paragraphs on a printing company.