Google Has a Whole Host of Problems

Ironfire Capital's Eric Jackson weighs in on Google, its future, and Project Glass.

"I'm very bearish on Google," he told Benzinga. "I'm not short Google. [But] it's definitely a company we're interested in shorting at some point in the next year or so." Jackson, who is the founder and managing member of Ironfire Capital, believes that Google has a "whole host of problems" and that the goggles are just one of them. "[Google] is a desktop search company," said Jackson. "The world is moving to mobile, and they don't make as much money from mobile search as they do desktop search. When desktop search accounts for 90% of your revenue… I don't care if they're growing YouTube or mobile search revenues. They have all these little businesses that they try to point out in their earnings calls, and they take last quarter's results and then they annualize that figure to make it sound bigger. It sounds big -- a billion here, a billion there, in revenue." But the reality, Jackson said, "is that these are drops in the bucket compared to their core business." "I think over the next three years there's going to be kind of a wrenching change where people are just gonna be using their smartphones as their primary computing devices," Jackson continued. "A big chunk of those desktop PC search revenues are going to go away. I don't think they'll be able to fill up the bucket with new revenues to make up for it."

Considering Google's history with product development, Jackson isn't very confident that Project Glass will yield

. "I would step back and say that Google has never done products well," said Jackson. "They're not a product company. They had one great product, which was search. It was a hell of a product. And it was almost the perfect business model that they tied it to. But they just don't know how to create new products that are pleasing to consumers." Gmail, for example, is just another version of mail, Jackson said. Chrome is just another Web browser. "They haven't come up with something new, especially a hardware/software device, that people love and find easy to use," said Jackson. "And it stems from their culture, being kind of an engineering-driven culture, rather than a customer-focused culture like Apple has." Jackson said that if the day ever comes when Google creates a great consumer product, he'll revisit his view. "Until then, I'll be skeptical," Jackson concluded.