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Comment by rimantas | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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