It's Microsoft's Turn to Disclose Cloud Revenue

In a major win for investor transparency, Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) officially disclosed YouTube and Google Cloud revenue when it reported fourth-quarter earnings results earlier this week. Investors and regulators have been pressuring the company for years to share those figures, which Alphabet stubbornly resisted. That all changed when Alphabet promoted Google CEO Sundar Pichai to Alphabet CEO at the end of 2019, with co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepping aside from daily operations.

MarketWatch astutely points out that the move was inevitable, since Alphabet's long-standing rationale for obfuscating the figures was that Page himself didn't even know detailed segment results. Having an absentee chief executive was already a poor excuse for withholding information from investors, but Pichai was more involved, and as soon as he became Alphabet's primary decision-maker, the writing was on the wall.

Inside one of Google Cloud's data centers. Image source: Google.

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Source Fool.com