Cloud operating losses have dropped substantially YoY, and revenue has risen steadily. It is at most a few years from profitability.

We're in a recession. It's quite likely cloud falls into a race to the bottom.

The "at most a few years from profitability" after a period of what, 15 boom years?, doesn't sound that great as the 3rd place contender.

Agreed.

Also the comparison is between Google versus Dropbox (the underdog David that's analogous to OpenAI), not Google versus Amazon or even Google versus Microsoft.

Google is 51% of office productivity software market versus Microsoft. Microsoft is at 47%, Dropbox isn't even listed. [1]

Dropbox has a decent share of the personal cloud storage market but has really failed to expand beyond that vertical or become significantly profitable. [2]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/983299/worldwide-market-...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1328893/global-file-shar...

The point is Cloud is still 100% subsidized by Search, and if Search loses even 5% of market share in the next 12 mo it is a disaster as GCP cannot fill the gap as they are still losing money. The velocity at which they are losing money is immaterial to the fact they are not nearly ready to plug a hole if Bing take share.

I think cloud's net revenue loss was very small last Q they reported. They may cut on some personal and services and become profitable if decide so.

Google has over 165B in cash on hand. Nothing is that dire.

Nobody got fired for choosing IBM either.