Why is it the jobs of engineers of the company to know what businesses need to succeed? Why do companies hire and VPs and directors for. Sure principal engineers and above do get a say in what to build, but I don't think they are hired via red black trees. It is the job of the leadership to assess the market and focus the company. The job of most engineers to build and at most have say in the product, not in what market to tackle.

Because the entire aim of every employee at the company is to either make the company money or to save the company money. The engineers are so busy “doing cool stuff” that none of Google’s products outside of ad sales have made any money.

And before someone mentions Android, according to information that came out during the Oracle trial (that Google tried to keep redacted), Android has only made Google $22 Billion in profit during its entire existence up until then.

Exactly this. Google products always feel like they weren’t designed by someone who carefully thought about and empathizes with the end user (thinking of Google cloud specifically).

Off course the end game of every employee at the company is to make money. But people are hired for specific focused areas for a reason. If you expect your engineers to do your VPs and director's jobs too, you should fire all you senior leadership. The employees aren't doing cool stuff because they don't care about the directions from above. If the product directions are wrong, it is a fault of senior leadership more than anyone else.

Android has made sure google will survive. If iOS and windows phone were the two dominant platforms, they could change the default search engine at any time, and give Google a huge shock. In the post PC world, without Android google would have been at the mercy of the mobile vendors. A lot of search income should be direct result of android, which the above figure doesn't acknowledge.

And in the end, Google still has to pay Apple a reported $9 billion a year to be the default search engine so they don’t lose the statistically more affluent iOS users.

What does it say about Android that even Eric Schmidt refused to use one years after it was introduced?

https://www.cnet.com/news/googles-eric-schmidt-why-i-love-my...

Can you imagine the CEO of Apple telling reporters how much he loves his Android phone?

The problem is that the VPs were former engineers.

Yes google is still paying Apple for iOS. But if iOS was 50% of the market and other 50% dominated by let's say microsoft, Google would be paying Apple a lot more, along with possibly not being the default search engine on Windows Phone. The difference is gigantic. Paying Apple 9B$ should be fine for Google as long as they are making proportional money from iOS.

> $22 billion in profit

I mean, "only" is relative here.

Total after 8 years? Apple makes a larger profit than that on iPhones in one or two quarters. That’s probably less profitable than the Apple Watch will be after its first 7 years.

The majority of Android's value to Google is indirect - by having people view their ads through their platforms and the developer mindshare that comes with the platform. It's exactly the same strategy as Chrome. It is very telling how difficult it must be for developers on the Play Store though.

Back then they didn't sell hardware which is where most iPhone revenue comes from.

> I don't think they are hired via red black trees

No, they were hired long ago via red-black trees and got promoted for building google plus.

Exactly. People seem to be missing that these engineers that are memorizing red black trees to get hired are seeping into the rest of the organization.