I feel like this was super true in the pre Facebook days but they were humbled A LOT by the massive flop of Google plus.

I honestly don't feel like I get the my s * doesn't stink vibe from them anymore.

Especially because everyone knows their Achilles heel now.

But for their ad revenue what would they be?

Everything else material from came from an acquisition or is infra stuff.

It's cool but they also had to learn the hard lesson of Hadoop too.

Yeah they built big table... But the rest of the industry standardized on Hadoop (at the time) because they never released an implementation and so they started losing out on good hires because they didn't want to get locked into proprietary Google infra.

I think you see them recognizing this with intiatives like all of the stuff around kubernetes.

But hey I wouldn't build anything on their (non open) stuff and get more scared by the day over my dependence on El Goog because they've shown time an again how little they care for us common plebs.

But I feel like they get better when they lose but they've only started losing more recently

(Rant over)