[patrickaljord]

They still have one of the best AI tech now and for the foreseeable future (despite their woke filters) and a decent cloud platform. And of course as you say they have Ads but also Android. I do feel like they could do 100x better but I think they're still relevant innovation wise (and financially obviously).

[mehulashah]

They certainly have a ton of relevant technology and product. But, much of that hasn’t taken hold — translated into large ever-growing, profitable businesses. Android, Chrome, etc are all mechanisms for their ads business and are not new innovations. AI is definitely new, but the jury is out.

[mehulashah]

While the cloud is an asset, I believe that it’s not innovative. Google Cloud is a distant third — they’re largely following. It exists because clouds require a certain scale and completeness, and they have the money to invest. Again, the jury is still out here.

[wenc]

I know Shopify uses GCP.

I'm curious, folks who use GCP, how is it?

[mehulashah]

There are plenty of customers using Google Cloud. It made $9.6B last quarter, that’s 28% increase from the prior year, and operating margin of 9.4%. In contrast, AWS made $24.2B, with 13% growth, and operating margin of 30%.

The point is that Google is buying the growth, which eventually runs out. While that’s a reasonable business strategy — it’s not the same as innovating a new business.

[piva00]

Bell Labs, HP Labs, IBM, and some other tech companies also had some of the best tech from their times. They couldn't execute good products out of it and eventually fizzled out. Perhaps that's what we are witnessing with Google.

[timeon]

But point is that they are still relevant businesses. IBM is like small country.

[piva00]

They are but they are not flashy, nor interesting, they are not what Google was in the early 2000s-mid 2010s.

And Google is becoming that, another megacorp that found its market (online ads) and will push to serve that as boringly as possible.