Comment by ArtTimeInvestor
10 hours ago
I've never seen a company that ...
You have not seen Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft? Where are you looking? They all did tens of billions of share buybacks every year for many years now.
Example: Alphabet has started share buybacks in 2015 and increased those every year. $70B in 2025 alone. And they are firing on all cylinders product-wise.
I'm happy you made my point for me.
I'm not sure what the point is wrt ASML, they made good bets, they won their monopoly, their shareholders who funded the bets get to enjoy monopoly pricing. If they start cutting R&D and lose their crown, yes it's shame I guess but that's all there is. To expect a company to sell their goods cheaply when they are the only ones in the world who can them is asking for too much. It's great that they and their investors took the punt on EUV all those years ago, we probably would not have the chips we have today and all the economic benefits around it
Has anyone in the last 10 years praised Google for anything, ever? They've been engaged in enshittification the entire time. Search is getting worse, Youtube is getting worse, Android is getting worse, Chrome is getting worse. They are indeed a hollow shell of the company that originally established themselves, but now that they have such a wide-ranging monopoly they can freely debase the value of their products to extract as much from customers as they can.
Google is still the best search engine. YouTube is still the best video site. Android is still the best operating system. Chrome is still the best browser.
And on the side they built the best AI and the best autonomous ride service.
Not bad for a "hollow shell" of a company.
Youtube and Android particularly are completely garbage and are not the "best" on any technical merits. To the extent they are used, it's solely because people are locked into using them by network effects. If you as a viewer use a technically superior video website, you will have no content to watch. If you as a content creator use a technically superior video website, you will have no viewers to watch your content. Similarly, if you as an OS developer want to make a new phone OS -- tough luck, nobody will produce hardware that is open and accepts anything other than an existing OS, and you can't sell a phone people will buy without modern hardware. This is why monopolies are terrible for humanity, and why Google's ongoing success has absolutely nothing to do with its technical capabilities or complete lack thereof.
Best in the Western hemisphere. There’s already equivalent alternatives available but it’s ok.
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When you say "worse" shareholders will say: "globally dominant in multiple platforms".
Sure Android might be worse from a pure Linux perspective, but what shareholder has ever cared about that.
Gemini maybe? (and before that the alpha fold and alpha go), they do have things they are good at
What products ?
They lost battle for office software, they can't even exist in chat space, despise trying to make chat that sticks for 2 decades now, they squandered on video chat space and office space too.
IF Alphabet was actually efficient they should own office space, but 365 ate their office productivity and even the utter turd that is MS teams is beating them out on chat.
Even their search gets worse and only places where they actually have progress is AI.
Search, Android, Chrome, Chromebooks, Maps, Gmail, Youtube, Gemini.
They definitely have embarrassing failures (chat especially), and some are not as successful as you'd expect them to be (Gsuite, GCP). But overall I'd say they are doing pretty damn well.
Compare to Amazon for example. They've only ever had two really successful products: shopping and AWS. Alexa could have been too if they hadn't spent a gazillion dollars trying to monetise it.
Or Facebook. They've only ever had one successful product - the rest they bought after they were already successes.
...yeah but that's just adding to point that shares buybacks are for companies that are stagnant and can't make successful investments.
> Search, Android, Chrome, Chromebooks, Maps, Gmail, Youtube, Gemini.
There is a single thing there that's not at least 10+ years old. And Search if anything is getting worse
> They've only ever had two really successful products: shopping and AWS
AWS is not "a product", it's a suite of hundreds of different ones. You're also forgetting Kindles which are fairly popular.
I think they sort of failed upwards in chat space with their RCS push.
> failed upwards
"became monopolistic entities."