I would question just how competitive cloud is. Companies with banks worth of cash and an existing army of technical knowhow are few and far between. The only companies that could enter the market right now are facebook and Apple.

By "super competitive market" he means between AWS, Azure and GCP.

"Cloud" for the purposes of financial reporting also includes the consumer cloud services workspace/gsuite/gdocs or whatever they're calling it now, right? not just the stuff at cloud.google.com

From the report: "Google Cloud includes infrastructure and platform services, collaboration tools, and other services for enterprise customers. Google Cloud generates revenues from fees received for Google Cloud Platform services, Google Workspace communication and collaboration tools, and other enterprise services."

If its so competitive, why are profit margins so high? I understand AWS is at nearly 30%.

Ad spend globally may be down; can a comparison be made to competitors' ad revenue to come up with a baseline there?

Youtube was a large contributor to growth in 2021-2022, and that engine appears to have slowed. (Not just the "Youtube ads" line that is separated out.)

Most likely the market is reacting to these results not being any worse. Cloud gains were already priced into the stock, in my opinion.

Search revenue is up, overall ad is down because youtube is down a tiny bit, but mostly because "google network" revenue is down a lot.