Other than search and ads, I doubt other part would do particular well. Breaking up Google would result in a lot of people losing their job.
I’m not arguing that you’re wrong in the idea of breaking up Google, but I doubt it will happen.
Some people might lose their jobs at Google, but a healthier market will allow competition to hire for actually sustainable businesses. The benefits of increased innovation and competition for consumers makes breaking companies like this up worthwhile on their own.
Probably less about training the users and more about sales/support, feature set and ecosystem as barriers to getting paid.
This is exactly why companies should be broken up. They can currently afford doing a lot of anti-competitive stuff just because another department is profitable while the anti-competitive methods/departments won't. That people would lose their job shouldn't be a consideration as they can surely find jobs elsewhere that won't exploit the public like Google have been proven to do here.
The need for everything to be profitable is why Google got into selling Ads and also why they keep killing projects. Many things in the world worth doing don't nearly fit into a nice profitable business but in many ways, bring some positivity to the world.
Android gave many people a chance at a modern smartphone and connected future. Chrome would never be profitable on its own but for a time, it forced web standards to move forward and freed many people from the mess of 1000 virus-laden toolbars in I.E.
It’s just a big risk-mitigation technique so they can further cement their monopoly for search and ads.
1. Search + Maps
2. GSuite + Gmail
3. GCP
4. YouTube
5. Android + Chrome
Each can probably support its own P&L sheet, other than perhaps the last (not sure about that one).
Such a move would surely limit innovation (I can’t see these smaller entities doing things like mobile ASIC development, although if TPU is under Search it would continue), but increase competition, especially in the ad market.
Wouldn't increasing competition also increase innovation as more companies can actually enter the market with new ideas? Sure, the innovation at Google itself might go down, but that should hardly be an argument against solving their anti-competitive behavior.
Android and Chrome pretty much doesn’t have a business case. GCP might be big enough at this point, but is still just burning ad money. GSuite/GMail is again a maybe, but can it afford the infratructure? They would at least have to cribble the free tier.
The 30% fee on everything Play Store seems a good enough business case to me.
Additionally, google works as a gatekeeper now because handset makers kind of need googles blessing. But android is open source, and potentially forkable. What really keeps handset makers onboard are the google services. But... if you split google, are those handset makers really going to feel as beholden to the android play store if they can get all major apps to run on an alternate store (already the case), and can get access to essentially all google apps without giving the android store any cut (after all, those aren't part of a single "google" bundle anymore then!)
I suspect the 30% cut would have to go; that super-high margin is really a bit of rent-seeking behavior even today, and only sustainable due to Google's overall market position. It's so high that the case could be made that e.g. Samsung's efforts to duplicate it is merited solely as a form of negotiating leverage, rather than as an actual alternative today. Without the whole consumer lock-in and bundle deal that google provides today, androids value proposition is much, much weaker; they could simply offer additional stores with better pricing, and wait for android to come begging for scraps.
Android the platform is certainly here to stay for a while, but as a business unit, assuming it were split from the rest of google? I'm less certain. I mean, I wouldn't count them out, but there are definitely competitors around that would gladly eat their lunch, and might actually succeed then too.
GSuite is incredibly ubiquitous and has no free tier anymore (other than customers grandfathered in), and GMail can still do ads. I have no doubt they’ll be printing money, relatively speaking.
It would be interesting to know how much of Gmail value is standalone ads, and how much is from the integration into Google overall ad platform.
> Android
Take a look at recent court documents about the size of the Play Store revenues. It’s a multi-billion-dollar cash cow after paying off the carriers and device makers to keep their spyware loaded.
> Chrome
Google single handedly kept Mozilla running for over a decade with their search deal. The deal for iOS is worth billions. Chrome will manage just fine.
> GCP
They don’t exactly run that thing as a charity. Anyone familiar with their pricing knows that this is a super-high-margin business. Plus, as a spin-off, it would immediately have a couple gigantic customers: Google spin-offs.
> GSuite/GMail
There’s only two main options for email and productivity SaaS (sorry Zoho). They’re printing money on this one too.
I should disclose that I would rather see Google stay intact, so whoever kneecaps their ad business can kneecap the whole empire in one go and make the whole company and all of its shareholders suffer at the same time. Companies don’t have a right to live if they are generating negative social impact.
Other than GCP, which I still think would fail, if split out in the next year or do, you make a good point.
Edit: losing $1.2B on a revenue of just under $4B. That only work because ads are paying for the construction of datacenter and infrastructur.
In other words, if GCP is spun out, and Google services keep using it (with realistic pricing) it’s going to have a revenue far exceeding $4bn.
Seriously? The most used browser and mobile operating system in the world can't finance their operations? If that's the case, then there could be no browser.
Firefox is still able to finance its operations and so does many other browsers. Google can still contribute to WebKit as an open source project.
Android can start charging a fee for every mobile device (not sure if they already do that?) and cover its development expense. It'll be a saner world where you pay for the services you are using.
1. Ads
2. Corporate
3. Cloud infrastructure
4. Ads
5. Retail app sales and hardware.
Maybe things get messy when those different models are mixed.
Having each smaller niche served by its own monopoly is perhaps better than having just 1 monopoly with a larger niche, but it'll still just converge towards today's ever more feudal society.
There is 0 polical interest in dealing with that though, and it would be a really tricky issue - after all, if you're serious about wanting to support capitalism, google is by no means the only company that needs to go. It would mean a fairly dramatic restructuring of the corporate landscape, and you'd need to have answers for scenarios where economies of scale are so lucrative, they outweigh the benefits of competition (would those be non-profits with multiple competing clients?) Also, the laws around intangible value (i.e. intellectual property) are pretty much designed for monopolization. Finally, we don't live in a vacuum; how will you deal with transnational corporations, and specifically with overseas monopolies that can play off the now smaller intra-national non-monopolists against each other? As tax-avoidance schemes have shown, corporate structures can get quite complex, so it's quite possible some kind of mutually dependent franchise system might develop with the true ownership still centralized and monopolistic - but external.
All in all, the path towards the idealized capitalist system seems implausibly long. We're going to want ways of mitigating the damage before we get there, and that implies ways of dealing with these kind of non-capitalist entities in non-capitalist ways; perhaps a special huge-size tax and a more interventionist state. And even that seems like wishful thinking in today's political climate...
Effectively it's already one giant company operating under multiple nominal mega-brands.
It could also just lead to weird tie-in with a central ad service sharing anonymized data between all participating companies, basically spreading the data Google monopolizes further.
There would be a net benefit to the world that would absolutely outweigh the collateral damage of that relatively small handful of people losing their jobs.