Companies collect their money when they first sell their shares to the public (via an initial public offering, or IPO). When you buy shares of Clorox through your brokerage, you're buying them from an investor who wants to sell them. The companies that print them get their money when the cards are sold, and after that, they're traded between owners, with their value rising or falling. Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) (Nasdaq: GOOGL) is a long-term buy-and-hold stock for two simple reasons - the company controls 58 percent of the world's Internet searches, and its mobile operating system Android dominates 85 percent of the mobile market. With Android, the company is trouncing Apple's smartphone sales volume on a global level. [...] it offers many products for free (Gmail, YouTube, etc.), which funnel users back to its real moneymakers - search and display advertising. Some of these efforts might not pan out, but each piece of the puzzle offers us a glimpse at Google's dreams of ubiquitous computing.