For the first few years they ran without an income model and hoped something would come along. That something was adwords, and it made all the difference. But an argument can be made that it was luck, google didn't start out with this income model, and kind of stumbled into it. A lot of people were initially opposed to the idea, but they tried it anyway, not thinking it would be a runaway succcess.
Hoping something will come along is a terrible business model. Google actively sucks at every business except floating down the Mississippi of cash. Amazing technology and technologists, terrible business.
They could double their workforce, or hire only people with comparative literature degrees, or force everyone in the company to speak Esperanto on alternating days with Klingon, or fire nearly everyone. It would be dramatic, but in terms of the bottom line it would be pretty close to irrelevant.
Google is not a technology company. They are a cash pipeline operator.
People buy Google ads because everyone uses Google for search. So Google doesn't need to sell anything. People come to them.
It's an amazing position to be in, but it's a very unusual one.
> It would be dramatic, but in terms of the bottom line it would be pretty close to irrelevant.
I'm assuming you're talking about all of the people in the driverless cars group, android, etc.
Two things at work here:
1. As a business their size you either try to take every single dollar that floats down the mississippi or you make the river bigger. I would argue that pretty much every strategy decision that Google makes is to do those two things (example - driverless cars means more people using the internet - more people using the internet means more search - more search means more adwords. aka the mississippi gets bigger)
2. Ubiquity. Starbucks sucks, but it's on every corner. Google's strategy is no different.
Microsoft have done slightly better at it. But in terms of ROI, they might've done better by just parking it in index funds.