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Comment by taeric

18 hours ago

The advantages of a single platform are as obvious as the disadvantages. In that they are often whatever you want to frame them as for a narrative.

I do think Google will continue to get results out of their tooling, as long as they are investing in the tooling. But that is not zero cost. Is it worth it for what they are doing? Largely seems to be.

But it isn't like they are that much more successful at software projects than any other company? They are still largely an ads company, no?

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taeric

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vineyardmike  17 hours ago

> But it isn't like they are that much more successful at software projects than any other company? They are still largely an ads company, no?

They have a ton of other software in 2026. And they have a pretty diverse (and diversifying) income stream today. Like 30-40% from non-ads.

Is it worth it? That’s for them to say, but they can ramp up cloud services at scale pretty fast as a core competency.

  • taeric  17 hours ago

    I mean, ads is 73% of revenue. Of the rest, ~60% is Cloud, ~35% is hardware and subscriptions and app store fees.

    So, sure, lots of spots for software there. But still nothing that would make me think of them as a software company. Or, worse, a lot of software that I don't have a strongly favorable view on. :D

compiler-guy  18 hours ago

Google is an ads company with a large amount of infrastructure to back it up.

Sure, the money is mostly in ads, but serving searches, AI, youtube, and all the rest at the scale Google does it requires a technical tour-de-force. Does Google do it better than everyone? Absolutely not. But it does it better than many.

Certainly it isn't the _only_ way to do it--other companies also manage to do it. But not all that many at the same scale. It's an existence proof that you can.

  • taeric  18 hours ago

    Most of what they do really really well, though, is accomplished by massive amounts of spending. That isn't a knock on it.

    Consider that they spend more on trying to build up and support this central IDE than most companies dream of losing in productivity to not having this.

  • randomCloud  15 hours ago

    There are things people do in Borg that when ported to our own public cloud kills entire regions. Sure you get limited choice but things work at global scale without thought

VirusNewbie  13 hours ago

If GCP was its own company it would almost be a Fortune 50 company on its own. Youtube would be a Fortune 100 company. That seems a lot more successful than most software companies.

Meta on the other hand, really just has ads.

  • rcleveng  9 hours ago

    Totally.

    GCP makes more revenue than Oracle, which is in the 96th spot. Also YouTube was 2x Paramount revenue in 2025.

ajross  17 hours ago

> But it isn't like [Google] are that much more successful at software projects than any other company?

I re-read this several times trying to figure out where the irony was hidden. But... it's not there?

  • taeric  17 hours ago

    Do they have more success in software products than other companies, though? Most of the software many of us know from them, were acquisitions. They still do heavy acquisitions. Notable that they have double the acquisitions of Amazon. They are on par with IBM. A colossal amount of money spent to make things happen.

    So, again, are they that much more successful at software than other companies? They have more hilarious flops than any other company.

    Don't get me wrong. I still use some of the stuff. I don't hate them. I don't even think they are particularly bad at things. I just don't think they are any more successful than other software companies. Specifically at the software side of it.

    • computerdork  16 hours ago

      Think for a large tech company, they did a really good job with success in software. For exammple, they were probably the first large tech company to realize AI was actually working, and made it their focus:

      https://www.businessinsider.com/sundar-pichai-wants-to-build...

      And yeah, they did/do a lot through acquistions, but seems like most major companies screw up acquistions. Google has it's fair share of failed acquistions, but especially in the earlier half of the company's lifespan, they really did some great one: Youtube, Google docs, Nest...

      maybe am biased, but have always thought Google in general does do it better than most tech companies. think it's their focus on the love of interesting ideas vs the love of money (although, that changes more and more as the company ages)

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