Magnificent 7 laggard Alphabet reported a set of large numbers after the bell on Wall Street Tuesday. Extremely large numbers.

I’ll confess to being exhausted by now with the belabored task of discerning whether results from these mammoths count as a “good” or not. There isn’t a day that goes by when half of humanity — and probably more than half — doesn’t interact in some way, shape or form with one or more of America’s mega-cap “tech” titans. Their products and services are synonymous with modern life. Suffice to say they’re doing just fine, regardless of whether a given line item does or doesn’t top some analyst’s estimate during a given quarter.

I doubt it occurs to most of us just how instinctually dependent on these companies we are. Sitting here right now, there’s something amiss with Google Sheets such that the formulas work, but the cells where the output should be are blank. So reliant on Google Sheets have I become that I found myself mourning this trivial inconvenience as though it’s an existential catastrophe. If I had neighbors, they would’ve probably heard my overwrought, disgusted lament directed at a spreadsheet which, Google’s semi-consciousness aside, is inanimate: “Goddamn you! What a joke. What a sorry-ass joke you are.”

Then I laughed at myself, opened Excel (Microsoft) on my Mac (Apple) and made the Q3 Alphabet revenue chart in there.

As you can see, the company raked in $88.27 billion over the quarter. That was ahead of estimates (the Street was looking for $86.44 billion) and up a little more than 15% YoY. The ex-TAC print was $74.55 billion versus $72.88 billion seen. Large numbers, folks.

Cloud’s where the growth is, or where investors hope to see growth, anyway. Analysts were looking for $10.79 billion in sales from Google Cloud. They got $11.35 billion, including $38.52 over the quarter from me for spreadsheet software that didn’t work today. (“What a sorry ass joke you are.”)

The search business, Google’s monopoly (allegedly) brought in $49.39 billion, a narrow beat. YouTube ad sales were in line at $8.9 billion and overall ad revenue of $65.85 billion was a beat, but not a large one. Subscriptions revenue of $10.66 billion comfortably beat (against $9.79 billion seen) and “other bets” brought in $388 million (the loss there was $1.12 billion, as expected).

On the bottom line, EPS of $2.12 was an easy beat. Operating margin was 32%, up 400bps YoY and a 60bps beat to consensus.

Sundar Pichai talked a lot about AI, and he’ll surely talk a lot more about it on the call. “Consumers and partners are benefiting from our AI tools,” he said, adding that AI’s driving new customers to Cloud. Remember, that’s your only goal as a tech CEO in 2024: Tell investors you’re working night and day to integrate AI and Cloud.

I don’t think there’s any utility in editorializing much further around this report. It was fine. Everyone knows the story with Alphabet: They’ve got an antitrust albatross around their neck and that’s a drag on the multiple. You don’t have to “pay up” for the stock right now, but you don’t know how much that litigation will ultimately cost to resolve.

At the same time — and in some respects relatedly — there’s the ever-present threat of peer encroachment into search. To say Google’s a tough fortress to storm on that front would be an understatement, but you never know. And ol’ Zuck’s apparently working on it between perfecting his AR glasses and floating around legless in the metaverse.

I don’t know. I just hope the Google Sheets glitch works itself out.