Google and Facebook provide tools to help people implement their dreams. For example, our nonprofit heavily relies on Google's services (email, drive, sheets)for everything. In fact, sheets doubles as a database that can be used for all sorts of functionalities without needing to learn how to code. My point is that tools that help other companies in their journey to innovate can make a real difference. I realized this only when we were in Nigeria setting up the entire program. I am much less convinced bout Facebook of course but I imagine it helps new businesses with an avenue to get a lot of early revenue. Substitutes, at least for Google products for me seem much less functional in comparison and would probably require an equal # of engineers.

I have no stock in Google or Facebook and don't benefit by promoting either in any way. I just genuinely appreciate what Google's tools has allowed us to do (linked spreadsheets, email, docs, Android, Chromebook, drive and search of course!). I don't care much for fb but I imagine there are businesses that wouldn't survive w/o it and whatsapp is amazing at bringing ppl closer.

> I just genuinely appreciate what Google's tools has allowed us to do (linked spreadsheets, email, docs, Android, Chromebook, drive and search of course!) [...] whatsapp is amazing at bringing ppl closer.

But Google and Facebook are not the only companies in town that provide these products. They just invest insane amounts of money (and thus human resources) to be marginally better than everybody else. That is the saddening part of it.

>But Google and Facebook are not the only companies in town that provide these products

Your argument falls apart there because they wouldn't be the only companies in town doing "medical or fundamental physics research" either.

It is blind luck that the industries and/or execution by Fb & Google allow them to print money - I don't think you can expect the same successes had they started off as medical or physics startups.

Incidentally, Alphabet is diversifying into medical research with Calico, and I hope it will turn out to be more than a billionaire's way of coping with their mortality.

Google probably makes quite a difference to medical research/treatment through its search facilities. Also this stuff http://www.forbes.com/sites/leoking/2015/08/24/google-sergey...

So instead of doing medical research yourself, you do IT work for a big company, so that its money can buy medical research?

In Google's case their actual product helps with research aside from the money.

why, would you prefer there not to be a search engine that can find (almost) anything you need in less than a second for (almost) no cost to you and then takes the money it earns from you and pours it into major projects with no promise of revenue?

Comments like these seem to suggest that Google or Facebook are the worst and one spends their time better somewhere other than IT. I really just don't see it.

Because Google and Facebook waste too many resources on keeping their market share.

For instance, if Google search took 2 seconds per search instead of 100ms, they would lose their market share. But that difference in performance is what is keeping 95% of their highly educated workforce busy.

It is just a worthless arms race, and I hope that people start to realize this.

To quote Jeff Hammerbacher, "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."