[dimitrios1]

Their stock price reflects their ad moat, and nothing more.

In my opinion, their stock price is the least interesting. They are coming around on the other side of an upswing and seem poised to be headed back down towards their pre-COVID normalization of around 90 dollars. Compared to Amazon, it's disappointing, and Microsoft is in another galaxy in comarison. With no real option for growth, considering they simply cannot be trusted to launch a new product, it seems like the early feedback is this will also hurt their cloud business as customers simply cannot trust them to maintain new offerings.

They'll do what they always have done: survive off ads and YouTube. But I am not sure how many more percentage points they can squeeze out of those two. People are already starting to catch whiff that their search engine results are not what they used to be. What will happen then?

If history is doomed to repeat itself, they'll do what their predecessors have done: get some Harvard-style MBA types in the building to "optimize", jettison all the excess baggage, and keep the cash flowing into their investors pockets, while they slowly lose whats left of their reputation and ability to innovate.

I suppose they have enough patents to troll on for the next 25+ years or so. Just like some other 3 letter company we may know about that once was a tech giant.