Hired 10,000 people in Q2 this year alone? What percentage of those people actually do anything of value besides cash the company’s checks? That’s actually staggering to me. Cloud division I can see growing. What else?
1. Ad cost-per-click goes down over time. At some point, the entire population of earth will be fully online and there will be no natural growth in advertising. The ad business stagnates. Google's stock price depends on growth.
2. Google has a bazillion incredibly highly paid employees. They don't just need billion-dollar industries to supplement ads, they need 100-billion-dollar industries. There are not that many of these industries in existence. Cloud is one of them.
3. Cloud services scale well, so nothing stops AWS from eventually reaching something ridiculous like 90% market share. This means that it is not enough to be an "also-ran."
4. Cloud eventually failing and being decommissioned would so permanently trash Google's reputation for b2b services outside of advertising and would so thoroughly gut the company (laying off 10,000s of workers) that the company would never recover.
I am a Googler. I don't work in Cloud. Absolutely none of this is based on internal information. I have no actual idea if this reasoning matches anything that internal leaders think.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-ti...
Paying by credit card or an electronic transfer presumably doesn't need an office of people shuffling paper around.
(I haven't used a cheque since about 2010, and I've never seen them used between businesses.)
Check processing typically has a fixed cost per check. This may fluctuate at lower volumes, but the price plateaus as you reach 10K checks per month. Say you get to $2 per check, and interchange is 1%. The merchant retains more revenue for check payments over $200.
The downsides are it takes 2-3 additional days to get the revenue, and there is no notion of a “dispute” for checks. In the case of fraud, you lose. However, there is less risk of this happening in B2B sales, which is the primary use case for checks these days.