It’s not too unusual for the first quarterly earnings report for a newly public tech company to be a disaster. In 2012 Facebook’s stock tumbled as investors wondered whether the company would be able to transition its business to mobile. Twitter’s stock crashed when investors realized, thanks to its anemic…

Google tends to throw lots of ideas at the wall, and then harvest the data from what sticks. Right now the company is feasting on photos and videos being uploaded through its surprisingly popular app Google Photos. The cloud-storage service, salvaged from the husk of the struggling social network Google+…