[blululu]

A lot of very smart people have also looked at the growth prospects of cloud and urged more investment, but I am not sure if their claims have panned out. The reality is that after a decade of heavy investment Google Cloud is still a distance 3rd. To make matters worse, the Cloud division's growth is mostly on the cost side of the balance sheet. GCP has a larger more expensive staff than its two leading competitors and a very unfavorable cost structure on a unit basis. (Perhaps this problem is a consequence of people advocating for more investment in Cloud). Given that Cloud a much bigger cost center than Search and somehow grows more year over year I would actually think that Cloud is what ultimately destroys the company.

[ghaff]

Google pretty much has to make Cloud work eventually or they're toast. (Or at least a much shrunken and less relevant company that certainly needs a fraction of their current engineering staff.)

[Gunnerhead]

What you and the parent comment are saying is incredibly interesting. Do you have any recommended reading regarding this?

[UncleMeat]

The usual narrative is this

1. Ad cost-per-click goes down over time. At some point, the entire population of earth will be fully online and there will be no natural growth in advertising. The ad business stagnates. Google's stock price depends on growth.

2. Google has a bazillion incredibly highly paid employees. They don't just need billion-dollar industries to supplement ads, they need 100-billion-dollar industries. There are not that many of these industries in existence. Cloud is one of them.

3. Cloud services scale well, so nothing stops AWS from eventually reaching something ridiculous like 90% market share. This means that it is not enough to be an "also-ran."

4. Cloud eventually failing and being decommissioned would so permanently trash Google's reputation for b2b services outside of advertising and would so thoroughly gut the company (laying off 10,000s of workers) that the company would never recover.

I am a Googler. I don't work in Cloud. Absolutely none of this is based on internal information. I have no actual idea if this reasoning matches anything that internal leaders think.