Re:Google suffers from a digital petro curse
by dragonwriter on Monday March 08, 2021 @10:42AM
(#26386866)
> Android and Chrome basically only make sense in the context of propping up their search monopoly
Android and Chrome make sense in terms of defending all of their web-based offerings from a hostile mobile OS or browser monopoly.
Their advertising dominance obviously is the only reason they had the money to throw at those problems, but a “search monopoly” isn't the only reason it made sense.
Agreed – I’d say “ad business” instead of “search monopoly”: Chrome is easily justified simply by making sure that most users spend most of their time on web sites rather than native apps. Web users are heavily accustomed to everything being subsidized by ads, and Google is definitely winning there even if you rarely use search.
My understanding is that the underpinnings of Google Cloud were built to support their own technology needs supporting their ad empire. It's also worth noting that Google Cloud indirectly supports their ad-based ventures. It gives them access to a higher economy of scale which makes serving ads cheaper, and customers are subsidizing development costs for things Google uses as well.
They're complaining that Google is built on data-mining and selling that to advertisers, not specifically about search. Anything that fails to compete with the crazy profit margins of targeted advertising gets killed, which is pretty much everything at the moment.
Google Cloud is somewhat of an outlier, I don't know why it's still around. They're still losing money on it, aren't they? I have a hard time believing the tangential benefits to their other products are enough to offset that, but I could be wrong.