If you took away the firehouse of money from search I'm sure a lot of those other parts of the business would find a way to make some incredible products. Think of everything that came out of the Baby Bells
What are the most noteworthy accomplishments of the Baby Bells?
In hindsight maybe they should have split up horizontally, nationalizing the natural monopoly components/infrastructure (ex: the physical lines)? It's interesting to see what looks like a reconsolidation of wireless now, I wonder what the future will look like.
It’s not just search. They make such vast amounts of money because they hold a monopoly across several layers of the stack: web browsers (65% market share on desktop, 67% market share on mobile), internet search (90% market share), and internet advertising (AdSense and Ads together hold 67%).
Interestingly, this dominance isn’t the result of fair competition, but rather acquisitions. Google was allowed to buy YouTube, Android, and numerous online advertising companies. You can see the list there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
I believe most of these acquisitions should have been blocked by the FTC or DoJ, but they weren’t, which has allowed Google to become a vertically integrated monopoly.
One of the things I think a lot about with open source is that maybe not every amazing idea is profitable (or profitable in the current business climate).
It may be that some ideas have to be subsidized. Google subsidizes them with money from ads. But it also costs them a lot to maintain their monopoly, and the monopoly and the ads are IMO harmful to consumers.
So I think we need some more ways of funding digital public goods. I think governments can and should (and in fact do) play a role, but I think there need to be other sources as well.
Arguably the reputation Google has for killing its projects is a signal that they have more good ideas than they have funding capacity to sustain them. I realize it's also perf/promo driven. But it's also the pattern you see with smart people with ADHD where they start great projects but don't have the resources to continue them all. So we'll have more and cooler software if we find better ways of funding open source.
if this is true, it's very temporary and very fickle. It is well known that Google rewards (1) big, new initiatives over maintaining long-running projects, and (2) things that power the cash machine over anything else.
Neither of these are good for the OSS ecosystem.
The difference in the housing market is that instead of being 28-year-olds who live in apartments, all those MTV Googlers are 38-year-olds with families who are sitting on a couple million in stock compensation each.
All of the broken up companies created, the Googlettes if you will, would be flush with senior devs and researchers, many of them somewhat well to do and likely with savings.
Many of those people will spread like the wind, create new startups, and will require a house with garage to house said startup.
The MVRA and agents will be happy indeed.
And we may get a new barbershop band out of it too.
*with the usual hijinks where a high-end device requires a bigger license fee than a budget phone.
I suppose it's possible that GAPPS would become licensed but the OS for free, though I could see the bean counters having a big problem with that.