alt Hacker NewsThe 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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The Acquired podcasts on Google are a solid background.
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.
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.
The catch is that you need to build good software so people use it so that you can show ads
> 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?
> 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.