[jfim]

I'd phrase it differently.

Google got lucky in the sense that they set out to build a search engine, someone said "hey why don't we do text ads," it made money, and they've been riding that ever since. They're the kind of company that drilled a few holes, found oil once, and is now drilling holes everywhere without understanding where oil comes from.

[vineyardmike]

The other issue is that search makes A LOT of money. Even if they find oil, it’s such a small amount compared to search that it doesn’t seem to move the needle internally.

If you look at the opportunity cost of supporting a small side business va building a bigger business.. you drop the small thing. Google engineering is expensive and they have a somewhat polished brand that they don’t want to muddle with a bunch of “non winners”.

Amazon has the opposite problem. They build everything and have to find a way to scale their internal orgs to handle lots of tiny side revenue streams. I signed up for a magazine subscription through Amazon and they had a website redesign that accidentally (?) removed the management portal link for a few weeks. They do so much they can’t even stay internally consistent.

[jfim]

Right, that's why for example it made sense from Google's perspective to kill things like Google reader because that doesn't really move the needle.

The biggest issue with that approach is that they're burning customer goodwill, and that affects their odds down the line of getting customer acceptance. Stadia is just another project in a long line of cancelled projects that leaves customers screwed over and less willing to use Google products in the future.

Your point about Amazon is pretty interesting, IMHO I think that's why in the long term Amazon will keep on beating GCP in the cloud space. Amazon having such a large set of offerings is that it makes their cloud offering particularly compelling, especially considering they seem to keep old services alive and have relatively stable interfaces. Their offerings might not be as polished as GCP's, and some of them are laughably awful, but at least I feel confident that Amazon won't change the API or deprecate/retire the service.

[bones-jones]

Nobody understands where oil comes from. Anyone who did would have drilled there already and would be a new letter in FAANG (maybe MANGA instead now that FB -> Meta?).

Since no one knows where oil comes from, the best way to find it is to drill everywhere (for which you’ll need lots of resources) and hope you strike. This is pretty much just Darwinian capitalism; companies in the market compete on whatever they think will give them the win (drill), and everyone who happened to be wrong dies or is bought out (no oil), and everyone who happened to be right (oil) becomes the monopoly.

Google is so huge and rich from ads it’s able to effectively implement Darwinian capitalism inside itself. This is almost the opposite of “riding the wave” - they are constantly trying new things and (smartly) canning them when it’s clear they aren’t worth the investment. By doing this, they are at least able to push the odds a bit in their favor that the next oil well is found by Google instead of startup #10327.

Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s pathetically easy to look at other services (e.g., MS or NVIDIA’s game streaming services) and say “obviously what the winner did is right and what google did is wrong, and google is therefore stupid for trying”. Think of how many apps (Vine, Cinemagram) tried to compete with FB/Insta and lost. Then TikTok came along and has beaten FB so bad that FB/insta is changing to be more like TikTok. TikTok’s market success is the lucky result of the flip of a coin whose weight no one understands. In hindsight, sure, TikTok’s win came from having done x, y, and z better than everyone else, but no one, not even FB, knew what x y and z were ahead of time (or they would have beaten TikTok to it). Google is in-house-developing Vine and Cinemagram (failures) in the hopes of hitting the next TikTok (success).

In a strange ironic twist, success in capitalism is brought by trial and error, a blind search… which just so happens to be Google’s bread and butter.

[Macha]

Hindsight is not all it is though. Plenty of people here, myself included, were calling that the need to rebuy games (compared to MS's all in one sub model, or nvidia letting you use your existing licenses), combined with Google's track record with lacking commitment to its services were fatal flaws to Google's value proposition.

The reply was that Spotify and Netflix worked, but all music streaming services have basically the same selection these days, and movies are deemed more disposable than games as seen by the rise of people rotating subscriptions as movie video streaming fragments, so they were never perfect indicators. The one worry was that Google would buy its way in with exclusives and introductory pricing a la Epic, but Google's pride probably prevented that.