According to Google's blog post explaining today's sales and marketing cuts, the company appears to have been caught by surprise by its revenue slowdown:
We over-invested in some areas in preparation for the growth trends we were experiencing at the time.
Google is hardly the first company to have done this, and the world has changed radically since a year ago.
Google's slowdown will likely be far from disastrous. But most estimates for the company's growth over the next couple of years, in our opinion, are still too high.
