Comment by compiler-guy
19 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.
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.
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