Facebook was public, growing, had figured out mobile and had already acquired Instagram. It was by far the top social media company.
Amazon had taken over online retail. It was already a behemoth. AWS was in its infancy, but it was growing.
Apple was already the most valuable company in the US.
Microsoft had been one of the top 10 most valuable companies for a decade.
Google was already a behemoth when it came to search. YouTube was massive and Android had just started gaining traction.
Out of the top five companies, Google is the only one that hasn’t been able to pivot or diversify. The rest of the companies have been able to learn from the mistakes of the previous generation.
In the case of Apple and Microsoft. They have both been around for 35+ years. Microsoft wrote the first version of the embedded AppleSoft Basic interpreter for Apple //e’s in 1980.
Small nit: FB wasnt public 10yrs ago but your point is valid either way.
Contrast Google with Apple. Even though the iPhone is 60% of Apple’s business, last time I checked, the Mac business alone would put its revenue well within the top 100 companies.
Google docs / business is interesting but I'm not sure they make much money out of it and are scatting on the freemium tier success.
https://www.ciodive.com/news/Google-Microsoft-Office-collabo...
[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2021Q1_alphabet_earnings...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/03/google-still-isnt-telling-us...
Even if it did - it is still mostly search advertising. That’s not diversification.
Spotify - like Jobs said about DropBox, they are a feature not a product. Most of their revenue goes back to the record labels. Their gross margins are slim
Uber - is losing billions and it’s unit economics isn’t good.
Lyft - See Uber
Tesla - it’s “profits” aren’t from selling cars.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/31/investing/tesla-profitability...
I disagree with the notion that the success of a for-profit company is solely defined as "profitability". Factors such as growth or value are also often cited as success criteria. I couldn't find literature supporting your statement that profitability is the only measure of company success.
Intuitively, it also seems wrong to me to claim that a children's lemonade stand netting $10 in profit is a more successful business than Tesla.
If I sold a bunch of dollars for 95 cents, my revenue would be astronomical. But does that make it a sound business model?
Which is a better business model? An Indy writer with 3000+ people charging $100 a year for a newsletter (Ben Thompson/Stratechery) or a multi million dollar news organization employing dozens of people with higher revenue losing millions per quarter?
What you're saying makes perfect sense to me though.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/net-in...
Facebook was profitable before they went public. The main reason they went public if I remember correctly, is because they had more than 500 shareholders and it made it more difficult to stay private.
As far as Amazon, Amazon wasn’t GAAP profitable. But it did have positive cash flow and was investing in infrastructure. The companies mentioned above have very slim to no marginal profit. They are literally selling dollars for 95 cents.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...
On the other hand, it’s reported that Google pays Apple $12 billion a year to be the default search engine on Apple devices.
Apple makes a lot more from Google on mobile than Google makes from Android.
Andy Jassy, the CEO of AWS, has said in plenty of public statements that only 4% of all enterprise IT spend is on any cloud provider. GCP is in a distant third.
So far Google still have a stronghold on search, they've been able to secure it with Android and Chrome by controlling the devices, they seem to be doing fine.
Apple’s business model has always been to sell “computers” at high margins. They had record Mac revenues last quarter. All of their other devices are just computers with different form factors running a variant of the same OS, most with a variant of the same processor.
Office and Windows have been the main driver for MS for over 25 years.
How much are customers buying $200 phones worth to advertisers compared to customers paying 3 times as much?
Google also has to pay third party Android OEMs a share of search revenue.
Google pays Apple to make Google the search engine on the iPhone for the same reason that Coca Cola and Anheiseur-Busch spend tens of millions per year on 30 second spots during the Super Bowl.