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> And they kept getting better at what made them big in the first place at least for another decade. Go back 20 years in time, and Google was a search engine. Today they are much, much more than that. Go back 25 years in time, and Amazon was a book store.

Perhaps you picked up two bad examples. Google search is worst than ever (for their users ofc, not for the ones who get money out of it). My experience as a customer in Amazon is equally bad: bad quality products (I have to spent hours filtering and double checking in order to say "yes, that's the item I want"), reviews over 4.0 that nowadays mean nothing, intrusive ads everywhere (e.g., I searched for boots in Google image search, and suddenly all the ads in other websites are about boots sold at Amazon).

I used to trust Google (I bought domains from them, used Gmail, I even bought their Nexus 5!), but not anymore precisely because how big they have became: almost-zero human customer support, they can ban you anytime they want and give you zero reasonable excuses.

> Google search is worst than ever

> My experience as a customer in Amazon is equally bad

But is that generally the case? From what I hear, non-tech people still love google (the vast, vast majority of people) and my personal experience with Amazon is pretty decent as well (though I’m not in the US, so maybe it’s not as much of an issue here) despite their search being bad.

> my personal experience with Amazon is pretty decent as well

Considering the endless dark pattern manipulation to get people signed up for Prime etc, the intolerably bad search, the hard to manage/judge "sellers", the god awful semi storefronts within a storefront from actual brands etc etc.

It is just not low hassle anymore, at every stage I'm paying extra attention lest I'm getting screwed. Turns out I'd rather go to a bookstore or a hardware store or whatever at this point. Even accounting for travel time it's lower stress.

I’ve been a prime customer ever since Prime became a thing in Germany, so I can’t talk about that. Search I already agreed (though it’s not intolerably bad, it’s barely worse than google), but the rest I have no issues with, I can see who sells what and I don’t even know where to find storefronts, all my buying is done by searching for the products or finding deeplinks.

I have heard non tech people starting to complain about both Google and Amazon significantly more.

...hence "at least for another decade" :-)

Yeah this is what I mean by hitting another home run. I think Amazon has truly successfully done this multiple times. Apple has done this to some extent - although they haven't really gone far past their core expertise. Google and Facebook not as much, they just happen to have businesses with massive total addressable markets that cover for all manner of sins.

But is that even the right thing to be doing? I'd argue Netflix would be doing a hell of a lot more for it's share holders to take the profits from the successful business they've built and hand it back to shareholders, rather than start gambling that money on building new businesses that are unlikely to succeed. This is what's happening right now with Facebook. It's a social media company gambling share holder cash on becoming a completely different business with almost 0% chance of success.

Great companies are not just defined by their products. Example for Google and Amazon is to illustrate that they've built a _system_ (consisting of brand, culture, values, etc) that can explore, prototype and execute in multiple different areas from scratch, and without being first to market.

Google has grown by using ad revenue to buy comoetitors or companies that do something interesting, then squeeze them for every penny of profit or dump them.

Google has a dominant search engine, a browser and massively intrusive ad placement system threaded through everything they offer. Gmail was a Hotmail clone. Android, Fitbit, Maps, Nest, and Google Earth were acquired. YouTube was bought after it out competed Google's offering. Even the advertising tech was acquired, with AdMob, DoubleClick invented outside Google.

They are dominant mostly because they have not been bothered by antitrust actions. That, at least, looks like it might happen sometime relatively soon.

Netflix's growth for a while has been in not just licensing TV and movies to stream but to become a studio producing TV and movies to stream (and even to show in movie theaters). They've also grown in the TV categories they offer (through production and licensing), like unscripted "reality" TV and anime. If you don't value their growth, you're not likely to give them credit for it.

They are also working on growing into at least one new area, video games.

Well said. I would've rather seen Netflix continue their revenue growth by expanding into other verticals, rather than by continuously increasing their monthly price, which in my opinion is a very uninspired/lazy way of increasing revenue.

If anything, one of the best forms of competitive market capitalism is when a company that's successful in one sector, invests in entering a new one, thereby adding competition to whatever that new sector is. Shareholders get more growth out of the company, consumers in that sector get more competition for their $, win-win.

Maybe this is because Netflix is a publicly traded company? with similar publicly traded companies, there is always a constant pressure to push up the value, and earn more money. Maybe they should take it private