It’s been an unsupportable business model from the beginning. Other than android, everything Google makes is easily replaceable by some other product. They don’t have a monopoly like any of their competition that will easily sustain them. I honestly don’t believe the majority of Google Engineers actually do anything innovative anymore as most of those people left the company when their pet projects were shut down in the first round of cost cutting measures (around the time Google became Alphabet).
Supposedly a deeply unprofitable one. Which is a huge chunk of why no real competition has surfaced.
It’s one thing to set up a proverbial store with prices so low you choke out the competition. It’s another thing to essentially pay your customers to come in, either by literally paying them or by providing a service that they pay below actual cost for.
Other than android, everything Google makes is easily replaceable by some other product
They built their entire culture on teams building new products. Which means a team would build something cool, get promoted, and leave that project. Who wants to join the maintenance side of things when all the promotions are being handed out to the ones who make new products?
It’s a broken system and best of luck Google!
They don’t have a monopoly like any of their competition that will easily sustain them.
Erm, you think Bing is a serious competitor? Aside from search (91.54% of the global search market), Google is part of an ads duopoly that is only stalled by walled gardens like Amazon, TikTok, Wal*Mart, and the various entertainment companies. There’s also Google Maps, used by 77% of users between 16 and 64, and their biggest non-iOS competitor is Waze, which Google also owns. For email, 75% of the US email market is dominated by Gmail. As for the user-generated media market, YouTube absolutely dominates that. The closest competitor (Twitch, A.K.A. Amazon) is far behind.
As for what Google engineers do, it’s mostly not rip-things-up-and-start-over innovation since these are all very mature markets with billions of users. Instead it’s small tweaks that generate hundreds of millions in savings or additional revenue.