Share buybacks are equivalent to dividends. They are done when the company can’t think of how to hit their target ROI on that margin. Much better to pay back investors than invent “something useful” to spend money on a la government budget game theory.

Google is already pursuing some extremely expensive bets - GCP (see people upthread complaining about this), Waymo. At some point, it’s hard to spend any more money productively and the best thing to do is return it to shareholders to do as they please.

Google could blow all the money buying Coinbase or something, but shareholders would probably prefer Google give them the cash to made that decision individually.

it's merely a symptom of not having enough opportunities to invest in. Their workforce (and many large software companies) is already too large for the amount of opportunity available. Even, world famous software engineers like Stevie yeggie had to eventually quit due to lack of impactful things to work on.

In the absence of any opportunity, all you can do is share buybacks or dividends, or maybe give out even more employee compensation.

What's weirder is that a large chunk of expenses for these companies is stock-based compensation for employees, and then they cancel it out by doing buybacks. Maybe try just handing out cash?