[jrockway]

Just like all the ads you get when installing Chrome or browsing Google Code?

Google does make a lot of money on advertising, but that's because it's impossible to not make money on advertising. Google could literally fire 99% of its employees and we would still make money on ads because it's that easy. You could probably start an ad company today and have a steady income next week. (You need a web server, someone with content to "monetize", and someone with an ad. Pretty simple.)

What's hard is figuring out how to make money once the easiest source of money dries up. (It's sort of like why we don't have solar-powered cars yet: because burning decomposed dinosaurs is so easy that any attempt to do something else seems impossible.) Future products you see from Google will be less about advertising and more about something else. That's why we have web browsers and open source projects and self-driving cars and space elevators. Try everything, see what makes us more money than advertising, then do more stuff like that.