Sorry, my post was not complete. No doubt they are doing great with their ad business. But they seem to struggle with making money from any of the other things they do. And to justify their valuation at some point they have make massive amounts of profit. Much more than they do now.

So it seems to me that some of the smartest guys doing the coolest tech in the world is not sufficient to making money.

> struggle with making money from any of the other things they do

They're not so much struggling to make money, but struggling to make comparable money to one of the most phenomenally successful businesses ever seen.

It's like saying Apple TV is a hobby because it's only a billion dollar business.

Rounding errors at Google/Apple are greater than our wildest dreams.

The struggle is moving the relative needle. I doubt they have trouble making money, but is it going to move that $20.3B number? Because in order to actually move it, it needs minimum revenues of $100,000,000.

I'm sure they make money in other pursuits (I'm sure GCE is doing some, and I hear their government contracts are sizable) but $100m just to tick up the revenue decimal point...

Amazon AWS revenue was 2.4B in Q4 and 2B in Q3. GCE would be obvious next (and the easiest as a lot of components is already in-place) big money printing thing for Google if done right. Yet it seems that they struggle even there.

One of the main issue i see here is pretty typical for Google in my view, ie. that Google isn't really trying to serve customers - i mean in search Google is monopolist and thus advertisers would pay attention to and follow every whim of Google. In cloud computing customers don't have to appreciate the honor of being a GCE customer, instead they can just go to AWS (where automated tools as well as real customer service are really geared for customer).

I'd agree with the difference. Maybe it's the articles I've read recently, but Amazon seems to have more agile / startup philosophies (trying, failing, continuing support, and iterating) embedded higher up.

I've seen too many instances of pretty simple Google usability / feature bug reports closed as "will not fix / working as intended" to chalk it up to specific teams. "We built the Pontiac Aztek perfectly, and you should love us for it" type project design seems embedded in their DNA.

How long did it take for Google to really start printing money? 5? Maybe 10 years? Think of those projects now not wildly profitable as the seeds of new, profitable businesses down the road.

Short term thinking, that's the problem with the equities market.

>How long did it take for Google to really start printing money? 5? Maybe 10 years? Think of those projects now not wildly profitable as the seeds of new, profitable businesses down the road.

What projects? The self driving car? The traditional car companies (that also work on that), Tesla, the Chinese, and even Apple who's verified to be working on such a project can possibly all kill them on that market.

What else of importance is there? Their AWS competitor?

> What else of importance is there? Their AWS competitor?

Google Fiber. Note how profitable that is for Comcast as a monopoly. I'm confident Google can still reap double digit margins while keeping costs down for Google Fiber users through their knowledge of network management.

Note they were granted some patents re: self driving cars. http://www.tomsguide.com/us/google-driverless-car-patent-usp...

0 to 60 is easier to do than 60 to 120.