> From a business side, they really haven’t done too much.

Myopic. They've greatly increased the eyeballs available to them through new products and business relationships

It’s been over 15 years and their net income was down year over year, their traffic acquisition costs were up and their margins were down.

The “eyeballs” they are creating are less valuable and are more expensive to acquire.

Isn’t that the same business plan of every startup? Get “eyeballs” and worry about profit later? What’s going to happen as more people start using ad blockers?

They are still just a one trick pony.

>> They are still just a one trick pony.

Nothing wrong with that when it got them to a trillion dollar valuation. And Google Cloud has the potential to be even bigger than their entire ad business.

Well “valuation” is just what the stock market thinks. Whether a business is sound is based on things like net income.

If “valuatoon” is all that counts, Uber is a successful company.

Google Cloud isn’t exactly capturing the hearts and minds of most companies compared to AWS and Azure.

Regarding Google Cloud, that may be true but 1) they took way too long to figure out what an opportunity it represents and 2) in terms of internal culture and external reputation they are not well suited to take advantage of the opportunity.

The former includes things like not being good at enterprise sales, the history of allowing employees to veto customers, and ADD induced by the wacky promotion system. The latter includes a legion of techies burned product shutdowns and abandonments that will never, ever believe that google really cares about back compat and long term support no matter what kind of contract language it puts out.