[fl0ki]

Putting aside that several of these were acquisitions, these are all great examples of things where Google introduced something for free because it would make the money through advertising, both directly and through ecosystem effects. Even the paid enterprise versions of these services were a tiny % of Google's overall gross revenue.

Prior to the push into Cloud computing, Ad revenue was well over 90% of all Google gross income, and Cloud was the first big way they diversified. GCP is definitely a credible competitor these days, but it did not devour AWS. Other commercial Google services didn't even become credible competitors, e.g. Google Stadia was a technically exceptional platform that got nowhere with customers.

The question now is whether Google carves out an edge in AI that makes it profitable overall, directly or strategically. Like many companies, there seems to be a presumption of potentially infinite upside, which is what it would take to justify the astronomical costs.

[harrall]

Google’s main ability is to win by pure technical prowess. They hire a lot of bright engineers. Google Search won over Altavista by pure algorithms. Google Docs (and Writely) were way more feature complete than competitors.

You love a Google product because of its features but never actually because of the product itself. But you can’t win everything by engineering and sometimes Google struggles with the product side.

AI is part engineering so we’ll see.

[ghc]

I'm not sure you can call Docs (Writely) and Android acquisitions though. Android was an OS for cameras and Writely was an experimental rich text editor, not a word processor.

It's not like Youtube where they legitimately bought their way to dominance. And I'd argue that even in the case of DoubleClick, google was already dominating the search advertising market when they bought DoubleClick to consolidate their dominance.