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points by theplumber 14 hours ago | 0 comments

Google really had developed only 2 good products(not including acquisitions such as YouTube): search and gmail. Their primary cow to milk has been search. The rest (I.e cloud compute) is not really a moat. I think we are facing a revolution/rotation where the these companies may start to become just “old businesses”(I.e IBM, AOL).

[–] whakim 14 hours ago

I don't really agree: it's pretty simplistic to boil Google's history down to two products developed 20 years ago.

I'm not really sure why you say that cloud compute isn't a moat. It's an enormous investment to compete there; there's a reason even large companies buy compute from GCP/Azure/AWS or even if they have their own compute don't attempt to compete. Additionally, GCP has been an enormously successful 'bet' for Google over the past decade.

Google has also turned subscription revenue for their various services into a major revenue stream; it'd be hard to call those various services (Google Drive, Google Play, etc.) anything other than successful.

Chrome doesn't generate revenue by itself, but it certainly drives advertising revenue across the rest of Google's portfolio and was developed in-house.

Finally, it's pretty strange to credit the success of YouTube as a revenue stream with a small loss-making company that was acquired in 2006 rather than Google, who has run it for the past 20 years.

[–] shadowgovt 13 hours ago

It's not a moat because it's a commodity.

Enterprises actively do not want Cloud provider's services distinguished by anything other than speed, cost, and reliability, because features imply lock-in. They'd rather have someone else's computer as bare-metal and run features atop that.

That's a recipe for racing to the bottom in the cloud space against the other providers, where the wins are very raw: what hardware did you predict two years ago you needed today, what breakthroughs in information structuring have your competitors not yet implemented in their own clouds, etc.

It's raw capitalistic competition, and that's good for consumers... But companies don't want that because it's a path to net-neutral revenue in the long-term, which is not how you put your stock on the moon.

[–] whakim 8 hours ago

The history of the cloud computing market belies your argument, in that the entire market has grown significantly since 2020, with all 3 big cloud providers >3xing their operating income (and 3-5x'ing their revenue) over that period. That isn't what you'd expect from undifferentiated, interchangeable commodities.

The scenario you've described sure sounds like the enterprise ideal, but it probably isn't the reality: in fact, some combination of high switching costs, feature differentiation, and/or price insensitivity means you have 3 highly profitable businesses.

[–] motionlessveloc 10 hours ago

If your business is tech and compute is a major cost of business, then sure, you want to avoid lock in.

But if your business is not tech, it makes a hell of lot of sense to pay a few bucks extra for a managed service like Cloud SQL to host your databases and let Google handle the security patches and backups etc, instead of hiring your own DBA to do it for you.

[–] jgalt212 14 hours ago

> GCP has been an enormously successful 'bet' for Google over the past decade.

I disagree on this. It's not clear how much money they are actually making and how much revenues are shifted over from other business lines to GCP because GCP earnings growth is / was valued higher than other business lines by the markets.

[–] whakim 13 hours ago

I mean, $11B in quarterly operating income ($33B in revenue) is clearly quite a lot. The only reasonable argument here is that this includes hardware sales (i.e. TPUs), but it is still a lot even if you subtract that. I think many folks internalized the narrative that GCP was an also-ran many years ago (when that was demonstrably true), but haven't updated their priors now that revenue is almost the same as (and may soon surpass) Azure's.

[–] HDThoreaun 12 hours ago

Google has spent $132 billion on capex this year. Most of that money is going to GCP. We have to think about the hundreds of billions being invested to contextualize the profit numbers. $40 bill a year is not enough to justify the capex they’re partaking in, GCP still needs to grow a lot to be successful.

[–] whakim 9 hours ago

I don't think it's correct to view AI capex as simply booking profit for Google Cloud - theoretically almost every aspect of Google's business should indirectly benefit from those investments. Bigger picture though, the bet behind that staggering capex is future profits, not current profits (see: OpenAI, Anthropic). Even if you think that's a stupid bet, the evidence won't be in 2026 income, it'll be in future income.

[–] motionlessveloc 10 hours ago

The vast majority of that money is going to AI. Some part of it is for internal consumption, some of it is for resale to GCP customers, but it is not some sort of loss making subsidy to prop up GCP.

[–] HDThoreaun 9 hours ago

All the AI revenue is booked under GCP. This isnt any different from people saying openai and anthropic are selling a dollar for 50 cents

[–] spwa4 13 hours ago

That's the big criticism on Microsoft, not Google. On GCP this isn't the case, because Google does not have a huge install base of MS Office to give "free" 50% Azure credits (but paying the same) faking their cloud numbers.

GCP has a reputation on being the fastest compute and network available. Also the most bang-for-your-buck (on hyperscalers) ML infrastructure by far (because TPUs)

Amazon is "the default" (and most expensive). Works with everything.

Azure is "Microsoft cloud". It's not fast, cheaper but certainly not cheap, ...

But of course that should be interpreted as GCP being 10x the cost of on-prem hardware (for equivalent storage/performance). Azure 13x or so. And Amazon a solid 20x (mostly because none of their products deliver the performance advertised and because if you buy 1 thing of Amazon, they bill you for 20 different things). Even with the price hikes a server under your desk (not the same, I know, however, once you have 20 servers in 2 rooms in 2 buildings and kubernetes running the workloads it is the same in reliability)

[–] cyberax 13 hours ago

GCP is a joke. Their sales reps are useless, and their customer support is non-existent. They are about 8% of the cloud computing marketshare as a result.

I hate Azure, but Microsoft is at least trying to sell it properly. You get a human you can talk to and their support is responsive (although it's also useless).

> Finally, it's pretty strange to credit the success of YouTube as a revenue stream with a small loss-making company that was acquired in 2006 rather than Google, who has run it for the past 20 years.

As a Youtube user, I don't really see any improvements in it (aside from technical ones) compared to 10 years ago.

[–] whakim 9 hours ago

> GCP is a joke. Their sales reps are useless, and their customer support is non-existent. They are about 8% of the cloud computing marketshare as a result.

This is an outdated or straight-up incorrect take. In the past quarter, Google Cloud's revenue was ~$30B, just shy of Azure (~$33B) and well shy of AWS (~$45B). That's about 28% of the cloud computing market excluding other players. Additionally, Google Cloud has grown a lot over the past few years and has been steadily eating away at AWS and Azure's market share; by next year it seems likely that it'll be bigger than Azure.

> As a Youtube user, I don't really see any improvements in it (aside from technical ones) compared to 10 years ago.

Sure, it's a website that serves videos (and ads); just because the fundamental proposition hasn't changed doesn't mean that Google hasn't done a hell of a lot of work into turning YouTube in a business that earns tens of billions of dollars a year.

[–] shadowgovt 13 hours ago

Most of the improvements have been keeping it running in the face of being the place everyone stores and retrieves video, and that's a lot of invisible work (but is the real reason you don't really see working YouTube competitors; it's a technically challenging big-iron problem).

[–] WarmWash 12 hours ago

The knife in the back of Youtube competitors is that people ad-block because they don't like ads, not because they have some kind of moral compass. Youtube mostly tolerates ad-blocking, which pretty much cements it in place as the absolute best streaming service (no ads, no subscription, unlimited free consumption).

The result is that it's basically impossible to get off the ground to compete with yt, because early adopters are almost universally tech forward. And tech forward people don't pay for shit (except the 1-5% who do).

[–] sebastiansm7 14 hours ago

Android, Maps and Chrome I use it almost daily for years. Dont know if are great at revenue, but are great products for me :)

[–] deathanatos 14 hours ago

To be fair, the parent is excluding acquisitions:

> not including acquisitions

Of which only Chrome is in-house created. I wouldn't think Chrome brings in a lot of revenue, and these days I'd argue FF is a much better product.

[–] scottLobster 13 hours ago

As a FF user, I've had to fall back to Edge/Chrome many times because some obscure hospital telehealth portal or bank website or whatever has issues.

I want FF to be successful, but unfortunately it's not really up to Mozilla

[–] edmundsauto 14 hours ago

I’m sure with Chrome, Google has smart people calculating the value of the data that they get from it. It doesn’t make money directly but it’s gotta be a huge money maker.

[–] mlmonkey 14 hours ago

Chrome logs every site you visit with the mothership, and that is very valuable data to Google. That allows them to spot, in realtime, trending sites for example. They see what the users are doing on the Internet in realtime and act accordingly.

[–] justinator 14 hours ago

I wouldn't call Chrome an acquisition, but it wasn't birthed at Google.

[–] motionlessveloc 10 hours ago

Huh? It was built entirely in-house at Google.

[–] justinator 7 hours ago

Chrome the browser? The browser based on Webkit née KHTML?

[–] motionlessveloc 5 hours ago

Literally every modern browser descends from Webkit. If anything Chrome diverged from it by switching to Blink in 2013.

[–] reaperducer 14 hours ago

He specified "developed."

Google didn't create Android or Maps. Android was made in 2003 by other people. Maps was Keyhole and something made in Australia.

I don't know enough about Chrome to say.

[–] vineyardmike 14 hours ago

It’s 2026, I would absolutely say Google “Developed” Google Maps and Android even if they did not “create” it originally. At what point can we attribute the success of these products to Google as a developer instead of Google the buyer.

Android had a market share of 0, with no released products when they bought it. The 80%+ market share today was all Google.

Google Maps was purchased (pre Google IPO), but the original (“Where2”) was a desktop application. Google completed rebuilt it alongside the acquisition of other data sources, and released the web page. Years later, they built a mobile app which became one of the biggest apps of all time. Should we not attribute that success to Google instead of the Australian startup building a desktop app?

[–] eloisant 14 hours ago

While Android is technically an acquisition, it was an unreleased prototype when they bought it.

It's safe to say Google brought Android to the level it is now.

[–] bbor 14 hours ago

  Android was made in 2003 by other people.

Look I'm Google's #1 hater but this is just goofy lol. There are multiple buildings full of Android developers, and have been for at least a decade; to say that it's not "made" by them is a huge stretch. Technically all of their products are just ripoffs of Sun & Xerox, right? Or Turing & Church, I suppose!

[–] phoghed 14 hours ago

Same with YouTube

[–] chimeracoder 14 hours ago

When YouTube was acquired by Google, it was already pretty similar in shape as a product to what it is now. The biggest differences are scale, the addition of advertising, and ancillary integration with other Google services. The first is a function of growth, the second is exactly what Google would be expected to do to monetize the service, and the third is another logical implication of "acquisition". (You could quibble and say they added vertical shorts and live video, but I don't think those are even fundamentally different from a product perspective from what YouTube was already doing in 2006, just fast-forwarded to adapt to the consumer technology we have today).

That's very different from Android, which was an unreleased prototype that had zero users and was dramatically different even from what ended up shipping as the first product, let alone what it is today. Android at acquisition would be unrecognizable from what the majority of people worldwide are typing on this very minute.

[–] phoghed 13 hours ago

Yes certainly if you discount the 20 years of development, the creator tools, the advertiser tools, monetizing creators, live streaming, completely rewriting the whole thing, etc. Google didn't develop YouTube much.

[–] chimeracoder 13 hours ago

> Yes certainly if you discount the 20 years of development, the creator tools, the advertiser tools, monetizing creators, live streaming, completely rewriting the whole thing, etc. Google didn't develop YouTube much.

I never made that claim.

[–] spwa4 13 hours ago

Are you serious? Just the hardware build Google did for Youtube alone. They 1000x (not %, times) their backbone bandwidth and they're still increasing it. Youtube used to have 2 small datacenters where they were acquired. Now it's 20% or so of half of the total Google DCs.

That's nothing?

[–] chimeracoder 13 hours ago

> Are you serious? Just the hardware build Google did for Youtube alone. They 1000x (not %, times) their backbone bandwidth and they're still increasing it. Youtube used to have 2 small datacenters where they were acquired. Now it's 20% or so of half of the total Google DCs.

> That's nothing?

Either you replied to the wrong comment or you didn't read the comment you're replying to.

[–] procone 14 hours ago

Android, Inc was 100% a Google acquisition from 2005. I thought this was a well known fact?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29...

[–] bbor 14 hours ago

I... yes, I know. But see the entirety of my comment above, I guess?

To clarify in good faith: what percentage of Android development do you think went on before 2005 in, let's say, mythical man months. 5%? 1%? Less?

[–] Danox 5 hours ago

Webkit, which was forked by Google.

[–] edmundsauto 14 hours ago

Why separate out products developed internally versus acquired and growth? There is an almost moralistic element in the tone of “well they just bought it”. Sure, they bought it and grew it into a behemoth, plus what really matters is not the provenance but how much money it makes for them. Plus, it’s reasonable to call YouTube (and instagram, which also gets the same treatment) two of the all time best corporate acquisitions. It’s not easy to buy a company and grow it like that.

[–] stpedgwdgfhgdd 14 hours ago

Working with GCP for 6 month now; AWS, with its own weird concepts, is superior. True enterprise.

As a simple example, a week ago we had the GCP outage in UK, their status page said all was good.

[–] TacticalCoder 14 hours ago

Not a moat and not big but... for SMEs "Google Workspace" is a godsend from outter space.

This is what allow little SMEs to not have to suffer that piece of shit that Windows is. I know people running their SMEs (and I helped them set up Google Workspace) from Mac and Chromebooks since years and years and who do not ever want to here again from anything Microsoft.

They're basically doing everything inside "Google Workspace" (formerly "G Suite", formerly "Google apps for domain" because Google's product naming is just confusing).

Gemini is also IMO excellent for everything that is not coding. It's really rare that I use Anthropic models (which I pay a subscription for) for anything else than coding.

GMail / Drive / Google Docs / Google Spreadsheets are great for a shitload of SMEs out there who want to give Windows and Office the middle finger.

[–] baoooooooooooo 14 hours ago

By SME do you mean subject matter expert or Small-Medium sized enterprise?

I could make this make sense either way

[–] oblio 14 hours ago

Businesses.

[–] oblio 14 hours ago

> Gemini is also IMO excellent for everything that is not coding. It's really rare that I use Anthropic models (which I pay a subscription for) for anything else than coding.

I use Gemini Pro for every day stuff and Opus is much better than it. A lot more features and everything works better, especially in the websites. Gemini is just... dumber overall. I had a project/gem (now replaced by a skill) and sometimes I'd start with them and then veer of course along the way. Gemini would religiously follow the initial context, stupidly, while Opus realized that a good chunk if it wasn't needed anymore after my last prompt and did the right thing.

[–] LPisGood 14 hours ago

Google Pixel / Android are very popular. Chromebooks also did well.

[–] Danox 5 hours ago

All Google loss leaders to service the ad company, Microsoft is also running into the same problem. Xbox, Blizzard games and Copilot are not profitable and to top it off. Between the two of them, they have spent upwards of $330 billion dollars in 2026 on AI models and AI CapEx. Microsoft laying off 60,000-70,000 people didn’t come out of thin air.

[–] mlmonkey 14 hours ago

What is Pixel's marketshare, for developed markets? Despite a decade+ of competing, have they made any significant dent in iPhone's share?

[–] Danox 5 hours ago

Virtually nothing. Their processor is at least seven years behind the times. It’s not profitable. It’s just a Me-too loss leader to service the ad machine. 3D models and data-centers are built on top of that.

[–] vineyardmike 13 hours ago

They’re something like 5% domestically, a little less if you include all budget devices, a little more if you only look at “premium” phones in its price category.

It’s likely made no impact on iphone sales, but I don’t think it’s a reasonable goal. Android and iPhone users don’t meaningfully switch, the goal would be to gain Android customers, and it seems, drive market direction. 5% of all US phones, which is 10% of android phones, doesn’t seem terrible considering they’re certainly spending a lot less than Samsung et al in R&D

[–] drnick1 13 hours ago

Pixels are good, if you replace Google's OS by Graphene that is.

[–] jeffbee 14 hours ago

It's absurd to say that Google did not develop YouTube. They acquired it at a point where it was a galaxy-scale cash incinerator and made it work economically using their superior platform.

[–] Danox 5 hours ago

They didn’t. They bought out another company. Did Meta create WhatsApp? and Snapchat? Everything else that Meta tried to stick their foot in has failed, but Muse seems to be promising. Both are very profitable ad companies. With a few me-too hardware products. Ads bring home the bacon.

[–] christophilus 14 hours ago

Yeah. I was going to say. I really dislike Google, but what they did with YouTube (whose acquisition I saw as a mistake at the time) is impressive.

[–] adam_arthur 14 hours ago

aka waited for cost of storage, bandwidth, compute to come down below revenue from advertising.

As it would have done naturally anyway

[–] conductr 12 hours ago

I think it’s naive to assume the ad revenue would have came at the same pace naturally. At least not without completely pushing users away and ruining the product (nobody likes ads but YouTube ads aren’t the worst). Google having an ad business was a strategic asset for YouTube as a business

[–] flomo 13 hours ago

Youtube was full of pirate music videos. If Google (or some other heavyweight) didn't buy them, they probably would have been sued out of existence like Napster and etc.

[–] TMWNN 14 hours ago

Only if revenue grew quickly enough.

When Google bought YouTube, it already had Google Video. Google saw that YouTube had market traction and pivoted quickly, to its (and YouTube's) credit.

[–] mlmonkey 14 hours ago

Don't worry, they've put an Advertising guy in charge of Youtube, and he's busy inserting as many ads as possible into each and every video...

[–] oblio 14 hours ago

People still don't see where this is going.

TV had both 15-20 minute of ad breaks every hour AND product placement during actual content.

That's where we're going in about 10-15 years.

[–] vineyardmike 13 hours ago

I think the generally accepted ad load has been shown to be about 20%. About 20% of TV is ads, 20% of social media feeds, etc. Seems natural that we’d get there with YouTube.

YouTube has had sponsors and inline ads for years from the content creators, so I’m fairly confident we’re already approaching the saturation point in some form.

[–] mlmonkey 13 hours ago

Difference is, TV had (has) content in 30 minute chunks. But Youtube has, among others, Shorts, which are often 30 seconds. But still Neal Mohan wants to show ads on Shorts.

On top of these ads, creators are inserting their own ads ("this video is sponsored by ...."), so it's ads all the way down (like turtles).

[–] drnick1 13 hours ago

> People still don't see where this is going.

At least 30% of Americans use an ad blocker.

[–] jeffbee 14 hours ago

Google doesn't pay for transit. Their private glass was the whole reason the acquisition worked.

[–] lokar 14 hours ago

And putting cache nodes in residential ISPs and exchanges all over the world.

[–] sowhat1 14 hours ago

Shhh just let the Googlers believe they’re elite super geniuses when all they do is acquire successful tech like Android, YouTube, and on and on.

Everything they make from within flops 99% of the time.

[–] Danox 5 hours ago

Google, Meta and Microsoft’s track record. Is not that good beyond their core in fact, they’re horrible when the playing field is level, Nadella right now seems to be the most vulnerable. It’s copilot or bust..

[–] DaSHacka 13 hours ago

>Android, YouTube

Before they acquired these, how were they doing? I'll give you a hint: they weren't exactly how we knew them today. Android was literally a concept and YouTube was bleeding money with no realistic path to profitability.

> Everything they make from within flops 99% of the time.

As do all inventions? Of course, you just don't hear about all the failings from individuals or smaller companies that went bust as a result. The important thing is the 1% that succeed are so successful it offsets the losses.

[–] kingleopold 14 hours ago

those geniuses that made acq. grow all have big retirement exit btw. Nobody in google worth low digit NW if they have been there for +10Y, so yeah they bet on their work and beat market for several years

[–] dyauspitr 14 hours ago

That’s nonsense. What about Maps, Sheets, Android, Meet, Chrome, Cloud etc. I don’t even know how you can exclude YouTube. It’s basically something they’ve worked on for more than a decade at this point. The number of google products we all use on a daily basis is pretty stunning.

[–] Danox 5 hours ago

The great percentage of it is free to gather information to service their ad empire the public isn’t paying for it directly.

[–] bbor 14 hours ago

I don't think the question of "good products" is really relevant here; the important aspect is profitable products. And in that arena, nothing beats the money printer!

They used to have a second minimint in AdSense et. al. ("Display Advertising"), but that shrinks by the year economy-wide as the vicious cycle of data tracking, ad blocking, and paywall dodging continues. Now it's a mere $7B[1], compared to $11B for Youtube (technically also Display Advertising but it gets its own segment now, I guess) and $63B from the money printer proper.

[1] Actual report here: https://s206.q4cdn.com/479360582/files/doc_financials/2026/q... Interestingly, display revenues are slightly up! But still, in Google land, "slightly up" is potentially a scandalous failure. Perhaps they settled into better agreements with big publishers ("sell side") after it became clear that they wouldn't actually be punished for having a Display Ads monopoly, despite losing the antitrust case brought by Biden's DoJ.