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by arihant 1697 days ago
I always wonder why Google doesn’t do an Apple and turn off all advertising on Google phones. Selling hardware and subscriptions has proved to be more yielding than advertising. With Fuchsia on horizon, Google can literally own the entire ecosystem from desktop to mobile.
3 comments

Their revenues would plummet - last time I checked, ads are something like 70-80% of their revenue. And they can’t charge anywhere near Apple can for their hardware products because they don’t have the established luxury brand. I’d doubt their other subscriptions can make up for much either. Maybe they’re making some progress on Google Cloud and it could be a long-term profit center but AFAIK Google Cloud still isn’t profitable as of yet. They ain’t turning off ads anytime soon.
I don’t know how serious Google take GCP. BigQuery Data Transfer service has been failing with internal errors when trying to copy datasets between regions for the last 2+ days. Must be no alerting/monitoring on the service. Doesn’t instil confidence in a platform when an important part of a product can fail with no one seemingly noticing. Good luck trying to contact anyone about it as well!
That takes time. It's not that easy to move your main revenue stream from one to another when it's an order of billion. And yet Google's ads grows very fast, something like 20~30% YoY.
You never touch your main revenue/profit stream. Bad for short term share holder happiness.