[taeric]

Question is if it got there purely on the merits of the software? Marketing and general infrastructure build out were far more influential in their rise.

Again, I am not meaning this as a knock on their strategy. It is valid and is producing real results. I just don't think their unified IDE is a meaningful contributor to it. The equivalent of boots on the ground is far more of a contributor there.

I had similar complaints about AWS back in the day. It wasn't a lack of ML offering in AWS that made Amazon Photos less useful than Google's photo offering. Despite what some internal folks would say.

[VirusNewbie]

Google has chosen to invest all across the stack in numerous ways. Why do they have 180k people working for them? Because they design their own racks, build their own machines, built their own network, designed their own databases, built their own scheduler, created their own build system, and yes invested in developer tools. I don't know what the coefficients are for each one, but you can go find plenty of older software companies that only try a handful of these and skimp on the rest.

I don't believe any of those companies have as many billion dollar successes as Google. They aren't the only company to do this, but they certainly do it at an unprecedented scale.

[taeric]

Are we disagreeing? My point, at large, is that they are able to spend more money on all things than most are. At the level that they spend, it will be easy to build a narrative that makes any particular spend look vital. It would also be easy to build a narrative to show any particular spend is a waste.

My contention would be that none of those narratives is a lie. But none would be that useful on their own, either.