There's only two outcomes: Either Google gets bored and kills it because it doesn't generate ten billion dollars a year in profit or it becomes so ingrained in our society killing it might cause an angry mob to attack Google HQ with torches and pitchforks.

Why it can't spin these side projects off into their own companies to survive or die on their own merits I don't know.

The second one should read “or it becomes a large scale ad data gathering opportunity”. That’s the value of Maps and Gmail IMO.

You're implicitly painting "become an unqualified mega-success" and "become a large scale data gathering opportunity" as if they were mutually exclusive, but they're not. It's because Maps and Mail are so wildly successful that they're great data gathering opportunities.

Wasn't that sort of the point of alphabet? To put these into their own self sustaining "divisions" so they could be spun out easily or at a high level choose to fund them?

I'm sure Alphabet was really a restructuring to optimise tax returns

> Why it can't spin these side projects off into their own companies to survive or die on their own merits I don't know.

They do sometimes. Niantic (Pokemon Go) used to be part of Google Maps (well, Geo) and they spun out completely.

They do sometimes do that, Loon 'graduated' to become its own company that issued its own shares and has since died.

Waymo is another spin off company.

The structure of Alphabet exists for this purpose.

My guess would be that disentangling a project from all proprietary dependencies is very expensive.

It's actually a pretty interesting element of Google, their adherence to a centralized infrastructure must make spin offs and acquisitions incredibly difficult.

Couldn't the spun out company just license the centralized compute infrastructure and subsequently migrate as needed?

Seems easy enough, unless I'm missing something here

> Why it can't spin these side projects off into their own companies to survive or die on their own merits I don't know.

They would only do that if the spinoff made them a noticeable amount of money. I suspect that is rarely the case.