[cinericius]

> You seem to be saying that the lack of focus is caused by the perception of a permanent easy revenue stream. But I think the causation is actually the reverse of that. The lack of focus is more like a breadth first search for additional sustainable revenue streams undertaken because they know the golden goose can't lay eggs forever.

I think the difference is urgency. They probably do know that the golden eggs will stop coming at some point, but they don't believe it'll happen for a long while. Perhaps as a consequence of this, they very rarely commit to projects in a life-or-death way. At this point it's a HN trope to state this, but I do believe the reputational damage done by this lack of commitment to any of its fledgling projects is doing massive harm to Google's ability to find new revenue streams.

[sanderjd]

Again, this analysis is exactly backwards. The reason they axe flailing projects quickly is that they know they need to find a small number of promising new revenue streams to focus on. What HN wants them to do - commit to small projects indefinitely - would be exactly the lack of focus and urgency being criticized!

I think what people are saying is something like "Google needs to focus on a small number of new successful large revenue sources". Which, yes, of course! But they don't know what those are, and none of the backseat drivers do either.

[Patrol8394]

What about AI/ML, Cloud, Workspace ? (+ of course ads and search).

Why didn't they launch something like ChatGPT? Even if it was half baked, they should have made more noise and marketing PR on what's cooking ... instead they let OpenAI and Microsoft take the stage.

Cloud? They basically invented the cloud! They were running in the cloud when the rest of the world was still copying files to production .. and yet they left that to AWS and Azure ...

Don't get me wrong, I loved Google, I had much respect for them, and that's why I am so disappointed!

They doubled down on monetizing on user data, search and ads, and completely neglected other areas they could have dominated hands down.