Amazon has an okay but underwhelming developer suite. If they bought Gitlab and did nothing other than say that they should have first class support for AWS deployments it’d be a good move, and that’s before you consider things like pivoting Gitlab’s struggling AI tools to theirs or aligning all of the supply-chain stuff big companies want.

CodeBuild asks so much and gives so little.

CodeCommit is on the way out, onboarding was disabled over the summer.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/how-to-migrate-your-aws-...

Better comparison for Google would be YouTube.

Yes but that’s also pre-Sundar Google when there was some semblance of vision. Now that Ruth runs the company behind the scenes with a vision timeline that is measured in exactly 3 month increments…well, good luck.

Some of Google's best business units were acquisitions.

YouTube, Google Maps/Earth, Android, DoubeClick, DeepMind, Firebase, HTC (Pixel)

Don't discount Google's M&A game.

They kill more than they allow to live, and doubleclick slowly hollowed out Google search by skewing incentives away from great content to maximizing display revenue via link bait.

Doubleclick is to Google what McDonald Douglas’s is to Boeing.

Don’t forget Docs (Wordly)

Are any of those from the last decade? They acquired them when they were a different company.

I wouldn't consign it to the graveyard that quickly.

It's a lot easier/more common for Google to kill internal projects and small acquisitions.

A $16B write-down is far less likely, especially when many Googlers internally realize how much a threat Microsoft is with GitHub + VS Code.