My belief is that ultimately monopolies are unstable.
Google's engine, which it has been specatacularly successful at, is obviously search. More specifically, it's search advertising. Google is a dominant player in display advertising (eg Google Ad Exchange, AdSense) but, at least when I worked there, these amounted to <10% of AdWords' revenue. They were a sideshow.
Chrome, Android, Maps and Youtube are all key parts of this engine. The latter three were acquisitions and that gets to the key point.
At some point a company becomes too large to innovate because no new business can compete, or will be allowed to compete, with the company's core business.
Google missed the social media boat for this very reason. Google+ came way too late. Google spent billions on this failed effort. The real mistake was not buying Twitter. I mean Google ultimately offered a rumored $6 billion for GroupOn at one point. They dodged a bullet on that one when GroupOn rejected the advance. Rumor also had it Google tried to buy Twitter in ~2010 when Twitter was seeking a $3 billion valuation.
Imagine if Google had slapped down $6 billion to buy Twitter. How much better off would they be?
There is a ton of process to do anything at Google. This matches my experience. And that's an issue but it's not the main issue.
But it's not only the monopolies that cause that, but also the combination with the need for infinite growth. A counter example would be craiglist, it has the monopoly, but the founder decided to stop "growing" 20 years ago.
Imagine what different world if Sergey had said: well pagerank is good enough, the money is good enough. At the very least we wouldnt have this crappy search engine with nlp and other crap mixed in that doesnt matter what search terms you use, always find the same sites.
I'm with you on everything except the Twitter part.
Google doesn't leave most acquisitions alone - YouTube is a notable exception, and I'm really curious how they've been able to more independently than most Google acquisitions. (Perhaps implicit trust placed in Susan Wojcicki?)
We have no reason to think that Twitter wouldn't have become the same kind of mess Google Plus did under Google's stewardship.
Youtube is an outlier but Google generally doesn't mess with success (IME) of substantial acquisitions. Youtube has their own culture (so much so that they call themselves "Youtubers" not "Googlers" and have (had?) their own campus). Android too were deliberately kept separate. Not that it was an acquisition but Chrome too had its own culture and codebase.
Buying things and killing them only seems to happen with smaller talent acquisitions (eg Sparrow, Urchin).
Google's engine, which it has been specatacularly successful at, is obviously search. More specifically, it's search advertising. Google is a dominant player in display advertising (eg Google Ad Exchange, AdSense) but, at least when I worked there, these amounted to <10% of AdWords' revenue. They were a sideshow.
Chrome, Android, Maps and Youtube are all key parts of this engine. The latter three were acquisitions and that gets to the key point.
At some point a company becomes too large to innovate because no new business can compete, or will be allowed to compete, with the company's core business.
Google missed the social media boat for this very reason. Google+ came way too late. Google spent billions on this failed effort. The real mistake was not buying Twitter. I mean Google ultimately offered a rumored $6 billion for GroupOn at one point. They dodged a bullet on that one when GroupOn rejected the advance. Rumor also had it Google tried to buy Twitter in ~2010 when Twitter was seeking a $3 billion valuation.
Imagine if Google had slapped down $6 billion to buy Twitter. How much better off would they be?
There is a ton of process to do anything at Google. This matches my experience. And that's an issue but it's not the main issue.