I think it goes without saying that anything Google provides for free, they do it to garner user data. Traditional search is dying. And so is the advertising that comes with it. They are finding alternatives. They'll keep "injecting" themselves into everything we use regularly. Ads will get even more targeted... much more contextual in realtime.
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I simply don't use Gemini.
I never asked for it, or agreed to anything having to do with it. I'm pissed off to find it bound to a hotkey or gesture on my phone (I'm still not clear what the actual gesture is that keeps invoking the damn thing).
The more unsolicited crap Google jams down the pipe at me, the sooner they're going to discover I'm not at the other end and the pipe feeds straight into a septic field.
If anyone from Google is reading this, I hope you're ashamed of your dark patterns. You used to be a testament to the ideal of putting the user first. Now I can't distinguish you from any other crummy, misleading, self-serving tech gorilla.
This is the problem with being the biggest in X. Facebook desperately tried to branch out: phones, video, VR... Eventually the only thing that worked was buying other social media companies.
Google is in the same position, yes they have Android, GCP, Gmail/work suite, etc but even all of that combined couldn't sustain the moloch.
Exactly.
These insane levels of revenue streams cannot be sustained with just one product for longer periods of time. Eventually, every one of these biggest X'es will need to branch out to different industries/domains to sustain those levels.
If Google had simply stuck at what they used to be, a solid search engine with some unobtrusive ads plus some other ancillary services, they could have sustained that more or less indefinitely. What can't be sustained is the endless growth that the stock market demands. If you dare to say "you know what, this is probably enough" you'll be immediately punished by the market.
We are seeing the counter proof right now. Search in itself isn't sustainable. The concept is challenged by GenAI-based approaches.
Of course they are not a 1:1 replacement, but for the first time we see Google's model being challenged and them having to defend, which they do by trying to drive competition of by integrating genai into their products. Once the competition is gone, they can reconsider.
There’s plenty of services that they could have gone into and charged money for.
I think this is true for all of the big orgs.
Main difference is that Google is bad at monitising any (non advertising) service; so free becomes the main proposition.
Is Meta much different though?
Google's non-advertising revenue is about $25B/quarter. There's only a handful of tech companies with higher revenue than that.
It is for example a bit more than Tesla, double that of Broadcom or Oracle, a bit less than Dell or TSMC.
Seems they're actually pretty good at monetizing non-ads goods and services at this point.
A good point, but I still think they're struggling to innovate.
Their advertising revenue is over $71B/quarter.
As far as I know the majority of the non advertising revenue is from Google Cloud and subscriptions for services.
Most of the interesting product initiatives they've launched (that I can think of) have folded.