What are the margins on Amazon's retail revenue after all logistics costs versus the margins on Google's advertising?
I'm going to take a guess and say retail probably breaks even (almost by design by Amazon but not sure if it'll ever be more than a 10-20% margin business because by design they are offering traditionally expensive services like fast shipping, very lenient returns at very low cost/price to the end user) whereas advertising is probably... 80% margin?
I know there are server costs, engineers to maintain them, but if Google stopped investing in growth as far as diversifying/expanding advertising services goes engineer/developer/management wise... how lean could they run?
Could they support Google's current ad offerings with a core team of... 1000 engineers? 500? 200?