The past couple of years Google maps has gotten more glitchy, given worse directions, and most recently started showing extreme lag. Maps in CarPlay started falling behind real-time. First by a few seconds, then by minutes. Wasn’t sure if it was the car head unit, phone, reception or what.
Out of desperation I tried Apple Maps. Not only did it work flawlessly, but its driving prompts are greatly superior to Google maps.
I could go on about YouTube having broken bulk-publishing of videos (this for my son’s football and basketball games chopped up into indivuap videos).
It’s all horrible now.
Not just that, but it's directly monetizable because if the user journey starts with a Google Maps search query, e.g. "lunch near me", those first few results are worth real money.
Apple Maps will get better at reviews as more people switch over.
And just like above said, google is optimizing for ad revenue not user experience. This opens the door for a competitor to swoop in and offer better results.
Reddit is chipping away the Q&A search, but time will tell if it has a similar downfall to quora/yahoo-answers.
I’ve seen TikTok lead in educational search, cooking, gardening etc. TikTok could potentially overtake YouTube all together over next 5-10years.
Google maps isn’t as far ahead as it once was. Apple caught up.
Then you got Microsoft whos teams and office suite whicj caught up and surpassed google’s office products (for what enterprise buyers care on)
Leaving what. GCP as their only disruptive marketshare product area? And GCP while high margin isn’t nearly as high margin as their ads businesses. For GCP to be profitable they need to severely cut wages for cost center roles. A PgM in GCP shouldn’t be making 300k when AWS and Azure spend just 200k on the same role.
Finally you’ve got the money pit of waymo, X, and the bets. All of them have neither a real path to profitability nor compelling return on investment.
Id say the investors are right. Google is the new IBM, return profits to shareholders so they can invest them in more fruitful endeavors.