Nope, that's just to deceive you. They still just want/need your attention and more of it every year on more surfaces. Online Media is way too profitable to "pivot" away from it :)
The idea that Google will somehow abandon it's current advertising/data mining business model is ridiculous.
In 2013 Google's non-advertising revenue was less than 9% of their total revenue.
For average people, the $0 price tag is one of the big appeals about Google's various services - of course those things are really just ways to acquire product (i.e. people) data/eyeballs.
If you look at a lot of their online services outside of straight search, they do not have the best experience, they are simply free and "good enough" to squeeze out or marginalise paid services.
But how much of that growth is true growth and how much is about sudden new income streams because of purchases.
e.g. they buy a company like Nest, which has a commercial product. Suddenly they have a lot of extra non-ad based revenue, giving the appearance of growth.
They don't need to pivot, they just need the rest of the business to grow bigger then the advertising arm. Which it will, since robotics and AI have the potential to be much much bigger. Of course, then people will worry that Google will create the technological singularity.
The idea that Google will somehow abandon it's current advertising/data mining business model is ridiculous.
In 2013 Google's non-advertising revenue was less than 9% of their total revenue.
For average people, the $0 price tag is one of the big appeals about Google's various services - of course those things are really just ways to acquire product (i.e. people) data/eyeballs.
If you look at a lot of their online services outside of straight search, they do not have the best experience, they are simply free and "good enough" to squeeze out or marginalise paid services.