[ravenstine]

In that case, few things will actually scale for The Google except scaling itself. The only reason that The Google even has things like Gmail is they consider it a loss leader, and the only reason quirky things like Google Books still exists is because there is just enough engineers who care at that company that said projects get (barely) maintained. Otherwise, it's all about growth and scaling things, and because of the level of decoupling between the customer and the business model from direct-transactional perspective, there is little to no need to treat the customer as if they exist at all. The Google certainly have a very interesting business model, indeed.