Isn't that the point? Something like 80% of their revenue is from ads so that's where their focus lies. As cool as a lot of the other products are, they just don't seem to do much for the "business" other than supporting the data for targeted ads. Meaning, anything that does support their main revenue stream is at risk during economic downturns. (I'd be happy to be proven wrong by someone who, unlike me, has real insight)
I think it’s a little more subtle: the ad focus means they’re unwilling to consider other revenue models or deeply appreciate how customers are different than high volume ad impressions.
The Google+ and messaging debacles are obvious examples but I think GCP and G-Suite were also seriously held back in a way which an independent subsidiary which had to make a profit on its own would not have been. Their executives just weren’t sweating the way they would have if they knew their shares would go down when they didn’t execute well. Contrast with AWS, whose leadership are running the service in a way which makes it clear they have no plan B involving ongoing subsidies from the parent company and thus aren’t blowing off customer support, features, security, etc.
You’re right and thanks for the re-focus. I guess I don’t know what else people would expect? All the incentives are for a publicly traded company to focus on what makes money. If you want to work on R&D solely for the sake of R&D, there are other options (notably in the public sphere). Expecting a company to continually funnel money into cool, but ultimately unsuccessful (by business metrics) ventures seems confused.
To be clear, my argument isn’t that they should ignore profitability but that they could have multiple revenue models for different products, not to mention a better understanding of what it takes to succeed in different fields.
I’d use GCP as an example of the problem: we buy services but their sales guys showed up like “we’re Google, of course we’re the best” and put approximately as much effort into selling as they do for Gmail. AWS makes a ton of people available, listens to what you need (and actually ships it), and follows up. Guess who gets the sale? Anthos was a cool idea, lots of smart people worked on it, … and none of that matters if you give up after begging them to show up to sell it.
Isn't that the point? Something like 80% of their revenue is from ads so that's where their focus lies. As cool as a lot of the other products are, they just don't seem to do much for the "business" other than supporting the data for targeted ads. Meaning, anything that does support their main revenue stream is at risk during economic downturns. (I'd be happy to be proven wrong by someone who, unlike me, has real insight)