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The point would be 1) avoid being locked out of platforms by not controlling the default search. Apple and Microsoft could either extract a high toll, or crush search engines by controlling what search engines people see by default. On iOS, Apple does extract a toll to be the default, but MS was denied this, by Chrome beating out Windows Mobile and Edge/IE. If your company is wholly a web company, and someone else controls the key onramps to the web, you're potentially in trouble. 2) If the Web becomes a toxic wasteland (which was happening prior to Chrome when IE6 ruled), users flee more towards silo'ed platforms and apps. A healthy web is as beneficial to Google as a healthy forest is to a timber company. It's like saying "The New York times is an advertising company, not a news company, so why would they invest in journalism schools if the point is to sell classified ads?" And then there's just plain old interest in technology. Lots of projects at Google start from 20% engineers time, and grow to large successful projects, without any business model, they're just costs. You've got more than a thousand open source projects I bet being run by Google engineers, the majority of which exist because someone wanted to scratch an itch. Go, Angular, Tensorflow, Guava, et al, don't make money and aren't intended to. |
I disagree that Google is a web company proper. It might have been years ago, but nowadays Google is capable of bending the very rules of the web and internet at their liking. As a result it can now essentially define what the web (okay, the modernish web) is, and that makes your points moot. Also Google's open-source projects are irrelevant to this discussion, much like that using React doesn't void your rights to criticize Facebook.