Facebook - yeah it’s just a social media company at its core, but before mobile really took off, it made money as a platform for games and shortly after its IPO, everyone thought it was doomed and didn’t get mobile. Between their strong pivot into mobile ads and their very smart acquisitions. Now FB has four platforms - FB, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp that all serve different demographics.
Apple. During the time that Google has existed, Apple has gone from making most of its money selling computers, to music players and a music store, phones, and now depending on the quarter, phone sales are less than 50% of revenue. Heck the watch and AirPods are each considered to be larger businesses than the iPods were at its peak.
Would Google ever invest in a product that only made up 10% of its revenue?
Amazon: (Disclaimer: I work at Amazon). Went from a retail store selling its own stuff, to a marketplace, smart speakers, AWS, Amazon Prime Video, and did a lot of successful acquisitions.
Microsoft - It’s basically removed it’s focus from Windows to Azure, Office in every imaginable platform, Sql Server even runs on Linux now, and has a successful gaming division.
In fact, the only 2 areas I think Google has really underperformed are:
1. The cloud. I'm a big fan of GCP, and I think in many ways it's easier to use than AWS, but Google still doesn't understand enterprise support and what big business customers value. I think a lot of this is just because Google doesn't have customer support in their DNA, and they had so much custom tech for so long (most big businesses want to use a relational DB, not Datastore).
2. Business applications. I feel like Sheets and Doc should have taken a much bigger chunk out of MS Office revenue than they have, but again enterprise support just isn't in their culture and hence G Suite lags.
Youtube is still thought you be at best slightly above break even in terms of profitability.
What happens to the ad network between ad blocking and businesses keep realizing that you can do better targeting with Facebook?
I can guarantee that being in control of the world's dominant mobile OS, and all the default Google search engine installs, Google Maps installs, etc. that entails, is worth much more in terms of mobile ad revenue than any directly-attributed OS revenue.
Being in control of the major mobile OS when the most affluent customers are on iOS is a Pyrrhic victory. There is a reason that Google is willing to pay Apple more than $8 billion dollars when it only has a 13% global marketshare. Advertisers care much more about reaching people who are willing to pay $650 for a device than people who are paying less than $250.
On top of that Google has a rev share with OEMs for ads.
Google is non existent in China.
Of course a product doesn’t have to be profitable on its own if you’re selling razor blades at a loss to sell razors. But neither product is doing that.
The console market itself is tiny in the grand scheme of things. The PS4 has only sold 102 million units since inception. The VR market won’t even be that big. In contrast, Apple alone sells that many phones over two quarters
Hardware sales are anyhow not quite as important as the software that runs on the hardware. The console market might be small, but the gaming market is absolutely massive. Facebook doesn't have to make money off Oculus hardware of it can, like Sony and Microsoft, get people into the ecosystem where $60 games are the norm and microstransactions total billions in revenue.
Doesn't sound particularly feasible at the moment honestly. But you never know. I'm not writing it off at least - the people who do like VR think it's the greatest thing ever created.
I was largely bought into the Second Life hype briefly. I certainly lived through all the brands setting up camp in Second Life.
But I'm skeptical VR was the missing ingredient. Most people don't want immersion most of the time. e.g. people hyping up VR for collaboration. I'm actually fine with video calls at least some of the time. But you're not getting me to wear a VR headset hours a day. Not happening.
I work remotely on the consulting side. It’s about the same work life balance as I’ve had my entire career. It’s actually better than my last two jobs. At those, I had to be the “adult supervision” trying to overall their processes while juggling releasing a product and for my last job, trying to figure out ways to cut costs and increase efficiencies post Covid. I’m just a much better paid peon now.
My experimentations causing a large AWS bill is not exactly a problem now....