They don’t have a very diversified revenue stream despite trying various side businesses.
Google and Microsoft have had the same business model forever .
Google and Microsoft have had the same business model forever .
Microsoft has Xbox, Office, Azure, etc.
Google has Android, Google Workplace, GCP, etc.
When you diversify your income streams you add more. It doesn't mean you get rid of your breadwinner.
Facebook's main model seems to becoming illegal and/or not viable via a tech perspective.
Alphabet is more than 80% advertising: https://searchengineland.com/google-q4-2021-earnings-379735 . They are good at skewing how they are perceived but they are very close to being a one-business company. Not defending Facebook, but Google is not much better.
But yes, Google’s acquisition of Doubleclick and investment in video through YouTube has allowed them to capture the publisher and buyer side of much of the open web (and use the data to cut out competition - cf. Project Bernanke)
Edit: sure, it's true that they put ads on everything, from YouTube videos to Gmail mailboxes, but that's not comparable to the level of diversification that MSFT or AMZN have IMHO.
But their business models are not same at all, nobody is valuing MS at trillions of dollars for its Windows OS licencing business. In the last 20 years MS has diversifyer into gaming and cloud successfull that are a big chunk of its current business and future growth, even with older products like Office they successfully pivoted to O365 and converted it to a recurring revenue stream.
Amazon is making more money from AWS than retail and evolved a lot as a company.
If the metaverse gamble works Facebook could be looked on as a similar success but until then their growth is risky
Google is probably screwed if search and ads go under, but they seem to be running an interesting experiment on how low quality their search results can get before they lose marketshare...