> Google and Microsoft have had the same business model forever .

Microsoft has Xbox, Office, Azure, etc.

Google has Android, Google Workplace, GCP, etc.

When you diversify your income streams you add more. It doesn't mean you get rid of your breadwinner.

Facebook's main model seems to becoming illegal and/or not viable via a tech perspective.

> Google has Android, Google Workplace, GCP, etc.

Alphabet is more than 80% advertising: https://searchengineland.com/google-q4-2021-earnings-379735 . They are good at skewing how they are perceived but they are very close to being a one-business company. Not defending Facebook, but Google is not much better.

Their "ads" are driven from more sectors than Facebook. Whatsapp has no ads, so it's basically FB and Insta

FB has Audience Network which extends their targeting off platform.

But yes, Google’s acquisition of Doubleclick and investment in video through YouTube has allowed them to capture the publisher and buyer side of much of the open web (and use the data to cut out competition - cf. Project Bernanke)

Audience network just took a big hit from apples privacy policy changes. Google controls the entire ecosystem for many users and most of the ecosystem for pretty much all of them, so they can never get blindsided like Facebook did.

I saw this claim elsewhere in this thread as well, but I didn't really get it. Google is going be affected equally by iOS changes. Google does control the Android/Chrome ecosystem, but I don't see how Google could make any changes there that hurt Facebook because of antitrust concerns.

Facebook says the iOS changes are going to cost them $10 billion this year. Google blew past earnings and issued strong guidance last quarter.

That's actually a spectacular improvement (82% ad revenue)... it was more like 98% not that many years ago. So while it's taking them years, they are slowly diversifying.

Yeah the figure I had in mind before looking for sources was 95%, which might have been a couple of years ago. There still is a chasm between how they make money and how people think they do. Probably because ads and tracking are more or less background noise when you browse the Internet, and things like Android are more sexy and concrete. But Android clearly is just a way to drive ads, not a separate business.

Google is not really that diversified, most of the revenue comes from ads. Microsoft is a better example of a diversified business, and IMHO Amazon would be another good example.

Edit: sure, it's true that they put ads on everything, from YouTube videos to Gmail mailboxes, but that's not comparable to the level of diversification that MSFT or AMZN have IMHO.

They also run the biggest ad network. If you want to put ads on your site or app, they make it easy.

Yes, that's true, when we refer to ads we have to consider both internal properties and external.

MS also sells the same things in somewhat the same ways from 30 years back.

But their business models are not same at all, nobody is valuing MS at trillions of dollars for its Windows OS licencing business. In the last 20 years MS has diversifyer into gaming and cloud successfull that are a big chunk of its current business and future growth, even with older products like Office they successfully pivoted to O365 and converted it to a recurring revenue stream.

Amazon is making more money from AWS than retail and evolved a lot as a company.

If the metaverse gamble works Facebook could be looked on as a similar success but until then their growth is risky

I guess it depends on how you define "forever" but the success of Azure seems to be evidence that Microsoft is fundamentally capable of pivoting to a new business model if they really need to, in a way that Facebook hasn't shown any capacity for.

Google is probably screwed if search and ads go under, but they seem to be running an interesting experiment on how low quality their search results can get before they lose marketshare...

That’s not necessarily a problem if the future of the cash cow looks bright. Facebook’s problem is that the cash cow is looking rather ill with nothing clear to pick up the slack. Also the business model of GOOG and MSFT is far more diversified than FB.