> Alphabet is great at marketing themselves as makers. But what they really excel at is finding great ideas in the wild and making them mediocre.
Mediocre for users that is. For the stock price, quite the contrary. $GOOG has about tripled in market cap in five years (start 2020: 50 USD, today 166 USD).
That is why acquisitions at this scale should be banned, period, no exceptions, and existing megacorps be broken up. Android has gotten so large and dominant, not even Amazon can run their own OS any more, much less any truly FOSS alternative, and there's no market pressure at all that would force Google to combat shit like deceptive ads in Play Store games. Google Search has gone utterly down the drain in usability but again, there's barely any competitor left and it's unviable to start one. Google Chrome still is the fastest browser around, its engine powering everything but Safari and Firefox, and the latter is all but gone in market share because again, Google's cash coffers fund development with which no one can compete.
A free market actually requires some sort of regulation to make sure competitive pressure can exist, and the behemoths are so large that effects of scale and network / vertical integration exert a completely unhealthy pressure on both users and the few suppliers that remain.