Google's advertising business is really profitable so anything else is secondary. Amazon came at it from a business angle. They had a ton of spare resources that they only needed once in a while and figured out a way to make use of them.
Not actually the case. AWS was a completely independent stack (from hardware on up) - we couldn't use it internally for quite some time (years); and even then, only in a limited fashion (e.g. only S3 for some time)
Is this true? There was the story about the resources they need for Christmas shopping that went unused for the rest of the year.
But recently somebody mentioned here (I don't remember where) that AWS was a separate business and that Amazon itself initially didn't use any resources from AWS.
so while there’s the ideal state of running amazon on a large multi tenant cloud, there was absolutely no safe and reasonable path to making that happen by extending the existing infra. it would’ve also hampered aws by forcing them to focus way too large way too early.
But they're the least diversified, after Facebook, agreed.
So yeah they weren't profitable but they weren't just scraping by either. I think that's one of those things that people miss when they compare a not-so-profitable startup to Amazon. The size, scale, and huge number of product markets that Amazon plays in is really pretty astounding for a company that is only 25 years old.