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Their bottom line is to get more exposure to their ads

Anyone who says this or its many variants has no business acumen or creativity. It is the banal banter of the boring. This sounds harsh, but seriously it grows tiring watching people desperately try to stretch everything to fit some nonsensical hypothesis.

Google is a very large company and their product is technology. They happen to have entered the market at a time when advertising was literally the only way to make money online (they originally tried to use the web purely to sell business search appliances, but that didn't pan out), but assuming that their entire future business model is ads is the domain of simpletons.

And, as an aside, I see more ads on my iPad and iPod Touch than I do on my Nexus 5. Isn't that weird?

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So. please tell, what their future business model is? Google product is ads, plain and simple.

Google has amassed the most enormous, capable data system on the planet. They have more knowledge about the world, places, people and information than anyone. They have continually demonstrated a computer engineering excellence that is simply unmatched.

If you lack the creativity to understand the opportunity ahead of them (or how the lack of these things has hurt companies like Apple), you should disengage from the conversation. Simply trotting out the tired, nonsensical "hurp durp ads" rejoinder adds nothing to the conversation but demonstrates a bit of tiring flag waving.

And by your very analysis, what is DaringFireball's "product"? It is ad (and t-shirt) supported, therefore the product is ads and t-shirts?

> Google has amassed the most enormous, capable data system on the planet. They have more knowledge about the world, places, people and information than anyone. They have continually demonstrated a computer engineering excellence that is simply unmatched.

I think the real criticism is that despite all this and all the potential opportunities ahead of them, pretty much all their revenue is from ads. Personally, I don't think of this as a cause for criticism, but I do view such a single point of failure as a significant weakness.

There's no pressure for them to earn money from anything besides ads. Maybe this is cause for criticism from some Wall Street bean counters, but I don't see how it can be seen as an inherent negative for a technology company. They do a ton of interesting future tech stuff over there, arguably more than any other company in existence.

According to the OP, since Google makes most of its money from ads, they somehow only want to strategically pursue ad-based revenue. This is beyond stupid analysis. Literally every business on Earth would like to diversify their revenue stream if it were possible to do so.

Besides there are plenty of examples where Google earns revenue that isn't from ads. See: Google Apps, GAE, GCE, etc. etc. If "We Are An Advertising Company, You Are The Product (TM)" was Google's ethos and defined all the work that they do they would not have built those products.

Odd... I was under the impression that Google was created over a decade ago, and that it still looked and quacked (?) like a one-trick pony for all intents and purposes.

But who knows... Perhaps, after purchasing a zombie business for $12 billion and multiplying its staff by nearly an order of magnitude in the process, it might learn another trick or three.

And yes, isn't it very weird that Google makes more from ads displayed on iDevices than it does from ads displayed on Android devices, in spite of the fact that the latter are reputably ahead in terms of market share?

How could we possibly explain that? Is it that Android devices are used as dumb phones? That Android tablets are gathering dust in drawers? That iDevices are so superior that users don't mind the extra ad annoyance? All of the latter? Other things? I honestly wonder... If you've a sane explanation, then please, do tell, because I'm at a loss to make any sense of this myself.

Wave that flag a little harder. Show the club how much you belong.

How embarrassing.

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