[Traster]

Yeah this is what I mean by hitting another home run. I think Amazon has truly successfully done this multiple times. Apple has done this to some extent - although they haven't really gone far past their core expertise. Google and Facebook not as much, they just happen to have businesses with massive total addressable markets that cover for all manner of sins.

But is that even the right thing to be doing? I'd argue Netflix would be doing a hell of a lot more for it's share holders to take the profits from the successful business they've built and hand it back to shareholders, rather than start gambling that money on building new businesses that are unlikely to succeed. This is what's happening right now with Facebook. It's a social media company gambling share holder cash on becoming a completely different business with almost 0% chance of success.

[hackernewds]

Great companies are not just defined by their products. Example for Google and Amazon is to illustrate that they've built a _system_ (consisting of brand, culture, values, etc) that can explore, prototype and execute in multiple different areas from scratch, and without being first to market.

[gcthomas]

Google has grown by using ad revenue to buy comoetitors or companies that do something interesting, then squeeze them for every penny of profit or dump them.

Google has a dominant search engine, a browser and massively intrusive ad placement system threaded through everything they offer. Gmail was a Hotmail clone. Android, Fitbit, Maps, Nest, and Google Earth were acquired. YouTube was bought after it out competed Google's offering. Even the advertising tech was acquired, with AdMob, DoubleClick invented outside Google.

They are dominant mostly because they have not been bothered by antitrust actions. That, at least, looks like it might happen sometime relatively soon.