| Somewhat, yes. And not by accident. For the last couple of decades, Google has been in an odd situation: - They make a ridiculous amount of money. - They already have a ridiculous amount of money, and also engineering talent and compute capacity. - Almost all that money comes from one single revenue stream. - That one revenue stream is very vulnerable. (If everyone in the world started using ad blockers today, Google would start going out of business tomorrow.) So they were (and still are) extremely interested in trying to diversify that revenue. And, reasonably, tried to use those strengths to shore up those weaknesses. That meant taking a lot of gambles on fairly wacky ideas in the hopes that at least one of them would pan out in a big way. It's honestly not very different from how a VC works, except that instead of investing naked dollars they were investing engineering time and infrastructure. So far, none of these projects has turned into anything big enough to meaningfully diversify their business model; they are still almost exclusively an ad company. But it's probably still wise for them to keep trying. (Source: I worked for Google for a long time.) |