YouTube, Android, Chrome, Maps, Apps... it's going terribly
On the other hand, Waze, Orkut, Nest. They spent billions on those and all they got was a lousy t-shirt.
This is the difference between mobile/tablet performance looking unprofitable vs. profitable because the conversions are attributed to them.
The Nest acquisition seems to be part of a long term robotics strategy, so probably too early to call on that one.
Orkut I'll give you--Google seems to have basically thrown in the towel on social networking.
The GP said that they are like Berkshire Hathaway - basically a conglomerate of profitable companies. This simply isn't true. Acquiring a company to incorporate their assets into yours is just M&A, nothing like BH.
Nest is a miserable failure.
I don't know a whole lot about the Nest story--seems the consensus now is that it didn't go well, but if Google retains engineers and IP that help them down the line with their robotics push, it's still probably worth something to them, though perhaps that will wind up being a lot less than they paid in 2014.
X who knows but they're supposed to be moonshots, but Fiber and Verily can hardly be called failures.