[throw_away]

If we're using stock price as a metric to judge strategy, GOOG's gains have been stomped by AMZN since 2006 by about 8x: https://yhoo.it/30KNk3A

By that chart, GOOG's only about 5x-ed since 2006.

[dev_dull]

If you compare most companies to one of the best-performing publicly traded company in the history of the world, you'll find they'll get "stomped". Who is the say they wouldn't have lost money and done worse?

If they would have invested in on-demand streaming video, maybe they wouldn't have been "stomped" by Netflix's 60x return since a similar date?

[lern_too_spel]

We're looking at the specific decision of whether or not to have invested in cloud services, which the GP poster said the Google execs had looked into and made a decision that was clearly wrong, which should have been obvious even when they made it. AWS helped Netflix build a competitor to Prime Video, but if Amazon didn't have AWS, Netflix would have just used another vendor.