Re:Starboard to Start Proxy Fight to Remove Yahoo’s Board
by phamilton on Thursday March 24, 2016 @10:26PM
(#11358125)
You are missing the targeting data provided by search and mail and how it is used with ads.
Sure, Gmail could sell customer segment information, but there's likely a loss of information.
No, Gmail would almost certainly survive if split off from Google. Search and ads are basically the same product, so splitting those would weaken both but not kill either. Google search has some of the strongest engineers at Google and a near monopoly on the market, their engineers could easily build an ad system for search from scratch. Ads would be weakened but not killed - they also have some of the strongest engineers at Google; they still serve ads on mobile and AdWords.