Super smart view. What's worse is when google (or other FAANGs) gets into a new product area, it in-effect suppresses development in the marketplace because very few people are brave/stupid enough to challenge a trillion dollar behemoth.
Nobody wants to say it, but Google is basically internet government at this point, and when government starts building products instead of just directing traffic, it's going to be anti-competitive and destroy opportunity in general.
How do they get out of the way and benefit while enabling growth? Move everything new into Ventures and whatever products survive on their own should be taken public in the markets and vertically dis-integrated from advertising and search. If they want to create growth, they're going to need to open it up to public markets, otherwise, they're going to be an anti-competitive monolith.
It's not a charity, and it will still make bazillions, but leveraging their incumbency means they are both risk averse themselves and opportunity destroying for everyone else.
> Super smart view. What's worse is when google (or other FAANGs) gets into a new product area, it in-effect suppresses development in the marketplace because very few people are brave/stupid enough to challenge a trillion dollar behemoth.
Is that actually true though? Googles forays into many markets were usually so horrible and clumsy that better companies could just use the media attention garnered to push their superior products.
Most Google beta products usually lack fundamental features, are geoblocked and completely ignore user voice. I haven't seen many of them really thrive over their better managed competition.
I think it's possible for both statements to be true at the same time.
A small company with a successful, functioning project is getting a little bit of traction when Google crashes into the market. Google bids up staff costs, uses free advertising to get customer mindshare, scares off the small company's possible investors, and acts as a huge distraction.
After stumbling around for a while, Google gives up, but in the meantime, they've put the small company out of business.
Of course, the small company might get extra attention which they can use to their advantage, but it will be hard.
I am sure not everyone agrees with me, but I believe Google single-handedly killed RSS by first creating Google Reader and using their power to make it ubiquitous and then killing it when there was no competition left.
There's only a few areas where Google really was a threat to early-stage startups.
The things they're great at by simply being such a behemoth with a ton of infrastructure willing to give away a lot for free or where their AI expertise comes in handy.
Search, obviously. The ads network. Competitors for Gmail are way smaller but they exist, since you don't need network effect, thankfully. Google Photos – I knew a startup that was developing a similar product for a year and then Photos launches and they decided to give up, because they couldn't match the free tier or provide enough justification for a paid product. Of course you need to be giant to take a shot at something like Stadia.
But you can compete with almost everything else. Notion, Airtable and Coda are fine, even though it'd be smart for Google to finally add a new, more modern product to Workplace. Google Tasks hasn't killed a single task manager. Google+ killed neither Facebook nor Snapchat.
> Move everything new into Ventures and whatever products survive on their own should be taken public in the markets and vertically dis-integrated from advertising and search
This would severely dilute their brand though. All of these tech companies are implicitly promising unknown future magic through the power of technology, eventually. If Google admits that the peak of their business has come and they are now a boring mature company ("nothing but rabbits come out of the hat"), I can't see their stonk price nor their mindshare with early adopters doing well.
To extend that metaphor, I'd say google needs to start stuffing more rabbits into hats, because if nobody stuffs those hats, we're all going to run out of rabbits. To do that, it means spinning off companies to go public that create wealth across a broader base of investors and innovators, instead of presuming the hive-mind monoculture of their organization can keep producing things people want.
There is an inflection point the OP makes about resource cursed economies, which is that when you have money coming out of the ground, you don't need to provide anything to your citizens in exchange for their tax base, and you get tyranny, because you don't need to pay anyone except the army to keep you in power.
By extension, Google could just flip the EVIL switch that they so strenuously tried to protect, and it would have zero negative effect on their bottom line. They don't have to produce anything else to maintain their dominant position, and this is the danger the OP I think has illustrated.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. Microsoft went through the transition from hip new thing to office & office accessories and yet they're still worth more than Google. A company deciding to slow down and swap reckless innovation for methodological reliability can be seen as a boom by the risk-adverse; remember, no one was fired for buying IBM.
Take the Petro curse analogy to its logical conclusion. You get interesting conclusions about Google's internal political economy and the incentives of its employees when faced with the Adsense machine and the profit it spews.
Adsense/Adwords spews tens of billions of dollars in profits every year. No new product launch can come to close moving the needle on revenue or profits for Google. Google's political economy incentivizes groups to build new products not for their revenue streams but to claim larger bonuses of the ad-revenue pie. The users who buy into these "new" products are just cannon fodder in that game. Remember Google+? Vic Gundotra made off with probably tens of millions or more to launch a failed product because it was seen as strategic for Google. Anything and everything in Google happens as an internal battle between groups jockeying for bigger share of the adsense/adwords pie. We are just pawns in the game.
I can't believe I am saying it but almost anything MSFT releases in response to Google or competitors is inferior but MSFT's products are preferable due to implied longevity. MSFT has inoculated themselves against this parasitic political economy while Google's users are held hostage by it.
Most Google project launches are akin to MBS's dreams to turn Saudi into a tourism/research/commerce powerhouse. Brand new Cities in the desert etc. They would have more success dumping cash into the ocean and catching the fish that come to feed on the paper.
"I can't believe I am saying it but almost anything MSFT releases in response to Google or competitors is inferior but MSFT's products are preferable due to implied longevity. MSFT has inoculated themselves against this parasitic political economy while Google's users are held hostage by it."
Yes, precisely. MSFT spent the better part of 50 years honing its selling strategies to companies, and knows how to deliver products. They may suck (and they do), but you know if you build upon them, they will not (generally, with few exceptions) disappear tomorrow. You simply cannot have that faith with google.
Gmail, could literally disappear at any moment. How screwed over would we all be if that happened? It won't, because it is the gift that keeps on giving with regards to intelligence gathering. For their real product.
Bingo. That is the other corollary we can derive. Any product that can give google reams of data on its users that it does not already have will enjoy a long tenure in its stable of products.
Reams of data means both depth and scale. Missing either one would mean an early death.
Do people forget the powerhouses that Youtube, Android, GCP, Gmail, Chrome, Google Maps, Chromebooks are (plus gazillion smaller companies like Waymo that have insane potential)?
People have been predicting the downfall of Google for a very long time now and yet they have never been bigger growing every year at astounding rates.
Google bought YouTube in ~2006. If Ruth Porat saw the amount that it bled in its first two years, they would have canceled it then too. GCP is questionable, they're falling behind.
I think the issue is that Google, at the high level, is incapable of thinking long term. It wants to see runaway success in a quarter or two.
Not predicting a downfall but just to give you some perspective: 80% of Google's revenue is from advertising. They only disclose net income for three very wide segments: Services, cloud and other bets. Only three services - that is search, youtube and google play - are profitable. GCP, maps, Chromebooks, Waymo, G Suite (that includes Gmail, Drive, etc) are a net loss.
The comment above is saying that Google can't invest for the long-term and requires runaway success in a product or two.
Your argument (that Google currently has a portfolio of products that are a net loss) shows that they at least try. In particular, GCP and Waymo are really long-term and strategic investments.
Do you have any source for Youtube being profitable? They've only been starting publishing revenue for it recently, but as of Q1 2020 they were still hiding profits [0]
Some analysts I follow (I think Ben Thompson was in this camp) have been long speculating that it was actually operating at a loss.
I feel your comment only supports the points in the article.
I would say that YouTube, GMail, and Google Maps are all direct funnels into the Adsense machine.
Android, Chrome, and Chromebooks see success only as instruments to have infrastructure to more efficiently push users to use the Google products to direct data into the Adsense machine.
Any Google product that does not sufficiently funnel user data into the Adsense machine is canned. GCP exists as a covinient way to make some side money on their existing infrastructure.
I think only Waymo is the true outlier in this case, but I think that lives as it's own thing, given that's under Alphabet instead of Google proper.
I think people love to look at the products they've discontinued, and they have discontinued a lot, but they fail to point out all the products that have stuck around. I think it's likely a result of a company trying a lot of things rather than a company that can't focus like the author implies. People don't talk about Facebooks failed products like email, dating, phone, beacon, portal etc.
Is that likely due to a lot of those niche Facebook products simply launching to very little hype? Or simply only launching to a very select audience for essentially testing purposes?
I remember hype around the Facebook Phone and Facebook Email, but that's about it really. Email didn't really feel like a death either as the rest of Messenger continued to evolve to what it became today.
I feel that Google has messed up its Stadia offering big time by overselling the cloud gaming features and trying to do a lot too soon (stadia exclusive games etc.) but I was hoping that Stadia succeeds. The concept of cloud as computing platform to play games rather than locally owned consoles just makes sense to me and Google was in a unique position to implement as they have data center infrastructure in place along with experience delivering consumer facing products. Now I'm thinking if Xbox started at Google instead of at Microsoft then it would have been killed too soon and we would only have Playstation as a kind of monopoly in higher end gaming. I don't think Google would be so patient to keep investing for years to nurture that biz.
I don't think so, people are def aware of these projects. The problem is the stuff you mentioned (at least YT, gmail chrome, maps) are in a pretty rough spot.
And while Waymo might have an insane potential, it is just that, a potential.
YouTube was a $15B business in 2019. Given that Google pays Firefox about $400M for search engine priority for its 4% market share, owning Chrome saves Google about $6B a year in payments for its 60% share. I bet that both maps and google apps for business (of which email is a core piece) are also quite profitable, depending on how cost accounting is done.
Also, Waymo became untouchable. A lot of Google's valuation rests on pixie dust promises of transformative potential of future AI. Admitting that it won't happen anytime soon and culling Waymo would take a lot of Silicon Valley ecosystem with it.
Those are all great products with excellent IP, but outside of GCP (and maybe a next-gen bet on Waymo), none contribute to revenue lines outside of advertising. In a way, this argument only further underscores the article's point.
They said the costs are increasing due to the data centers they are building. Their revenues have been increasing at a steady tick and if you check their blog they seem to have a steady stream of new customers
> Google won't get back to the mojo that gave us search, gmail, and maps before the petro curse is cured.
HN may have differing opinions, but Google’s Cloud business is likely their next big business. They’ve been growing quite rapidly, I doubt it will join the graveyard.
I would also add their subscription business with YouTube Premium, YouTube TV, Google Drive ( using Photos storage and exclusive features ) is just warming up. Over the past year I've seen more people pony up for YouTube Premium and once you go ad-free you don't go back. I suspect they would look to extending that to GMail and some of their other products as well.
I've gone back repeatedly. I keep accepting the free trial for three months without their incredibly annoying and hostile ads, and then cancel before it charges me because I'd rather walk on hot coals than give Google or it's ilk money.
90% of the YouTube ads I get are just for a freaking keylogger[1] anyways.
[1] Grammarly is a keylogger, it logs every keystroke you make and sends it to their cloud service. Fair warning.
"Dutch Disease" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease is the usual term. Although arguably corruption and kleptocracy are more problematic in resource rich nations, and the Dutch did ok.
That looks similar, but it's not the same phenomenon that is described in the article. The Dutch disease is based around currency appreciation making industry less competitive. Google is not a nation with its own currency (yet?).
Did they? I'm under the impression that it's a small country with a distinct upper class. The right people live in Wassenaar and Bussum etc. with ludicrous property prices and have all the influence.
They are good at camouflaging inequality and other things. The lower classes get enough to get by, so it isn't obvious. The rich don't brag, wear cheap suits and look like regular people.
But the old-money royalty is obvious, and probably just very good at hiding corruption.
> Just earlier this month, Google rang the death notice on Stadia
I keep seeing this, and it isn't true. (Not yet at least.)
Google shut down its game studios (which never released anything anyway), but is continuing to support 3rd party developers releasing their games on Stadia.
The fact that they have up on their first party studio means the clock has been started on a shutdown. If Google sends the signal that their first party Stadia studio is a lost cause, what signal does that send to the third party developers?
Google didn't have the patience for their own studio to bear fruit, so it doesn't bode well for them to have patience with the platform, much less invest in it.
The shutdown of the first party studio sends a signal, but the freezing of the Google account for the Terraria lead developer to the point where the Stadia port of Terraria was cancelled sends an even stronger signal to indie developers who were considering Stadia - Google does not support you, you are a digital sharecropper, and you'll take what you're given and like it or buzz off.
> [...] what signal does that send to the third party developers
This but also: what signal does this send to the consumer to whom Google abandoning services is already a running joke. Would anyone knowing about this now buy a game on Stadia that they can only play on that very shaky platform?
Never mind signals, the last hn thread on Stadia said third party developers were basically left on their own with a paltry $10,000 budget (as opposed to Microsoft’s investing millions).
But they also launched it with a big bang like any other big console maker. Therefore shutting down first party studios is a big red flag that they intend on not supporting the device going forward. Imagine what the message would be if Microsoft or Sony shut down their internal/owned game development studios, or if Nintendo decided to stop making games and just make the console hardware. You would not want to buy their new consoles which were released just now.
Even though it might not be true that they're shutting it down, it for sure sends a strong signal that they intend to.
Google had a perception issue when they started Stadia - many people thought they would abandon it pretty quickly. Even if they're, in fact, still supporting 3rd party developers closing their 1st party studio is going to send the skepticism that existed from the beginning of Stadia into overdrive. Whatever Google plans to do, the perception now is that Stadia is already dead. That's going to make Stadia a tough(er) sell to both users and 3rd party studios.
You are correct, but, have you used Stadia at all? I have and frankly it's clear that Google is not investing in it. Even with a great internet connection, the rendering on the server side is often laggy, pixelated, blurred, and stutters. It definitely appears that they are not running the games on big enough machines or are oversharing machines or something. I tried playing 3 different games over this past weekend and all 3 were unplayable. When the user experience is that poor, the writing is on the wall.
People and companies peak for one or two generations at most. What happens long before the petro issue described here is people generally stop giving a fuck.
There are few organizations that make it past any long range of time and when they do they’re well past their hay day, whether is Std Oil, Dutch East India, Exxon ,etc. Folks at Basecamp will lose their steam similarly when DHH leaves too and stops giving a fuck. It’ll happen to Apple, Amazon and Google. It’s the natural cycle.
There is also the issue of pay and a sense of having enough. Many tech workers are very highly paid. At some point, you have enough money so you don't really have to work. I myself reached "my number" last year and retired. My guess is that there must be many more people like me who will be retiring early in the future.
Nintendo as a company is 120 years old. Nintendo as a video game company is 50 years old, more or less. The reason why it's held on for so long is not its brand , it's their properties. Nintendo is essentially the Disney of the video game world; they own immensely popular pop-culture trademarks which they can rehash and reboot over and over and over again.
Nintendo isn't a tech company, they're a publisher which so happens to publish their properties mostly as games, and do a remarkably good job of producing consoles which you need to buy to enjoy their properties. This is why they'll still be around in 100 years, and Microsoft and Apple most likely won't.
Nintendo as everyone knows it is only a few decades old; a company can continue to exist for centuries if it becomes simply a "holding company" (Berkshire Hathaway is just a mutual fund, basically) or otherwise reinvents itself.
I wonder if a part of that longevity is the org/incentives structure.
And (cynically) maybe just that regulation entrenches existing finance players and there isn't anywhere near as much anti-trust conversation over there.
Parts of the analogy are true: over dependence on a single source of lucrative revenue can make it hard to invest in new things.
That said, the analogy breaks down. Petro-states have other issues: weak institutions, corruption. Their lucrative revenue steam, unlike online ads at least so far, is also very volatile with boom and bust cycles. It also creates all sorts of weird economic distortions, like exchange rate effects that make it hard to invest in other industries.
And finally, GCP, Waymo, Android and many others beg to differ. Yes, Google still depends primarily on Ads, but it's far from being the Venezuela or Iraq of companies.
GCP is still flailing around trying to find solid ground. After multiple fits and starts, with Kurian at the helm they're at least making an attempt to attract enterprises, but their inability to commit to a product in the consumer division has ABSOLUTELY tarnished their reputation with the enterprise.
>Waymo, Android
Waymo and Android have only survived because they feed the advertising beast. Don't kid yourself into believing either one would still exist if they didn't.
The reason google can't make a decent messaging app is because by definition, people want their messages to be private. Google can't data mine and let you have privacy - it's why allo literally died DURING the product announcement because someone caught wind that they were going to do encrypted chats that couldn't be data mined. And instead they're trying to push RCS - without encryption - that nobody wants besides them and the mobile companies who also want to data mine.
Everything about a petro state seems to apply here. As for google not having weak institutions and corruption, I'd say they just do a better job of covering it up than most petro states. See: Andy Rubin.
Andy Rubin case is horrendous, but it's a different type of corruption. Petro corruption would be siphoning money off to personal accounts, kick backs, etc.
Anyway, petro states depend on a single source of depletable revenue. They even fail at all attempts to expand up the value chain around services or refining of their oil. Even if Google's only successes are around furthering their ads revenue, that's still a far cry from petro states.
Readit News
Nobody wants to say it, but Google is basically internet government at this point, and when government starts building products instead of just directing traffic, it's going to be anti-competitive and destroy opportunity in general.
How do they get out of the way and benefit while enabling growth? Move everything new into Ventures and whatever products survive on their own should be taken public in the markets and vertically dis-integrated from advertising and search. If they want to create growth, they're going to need to open it up to public markets, otherwise, they're going to be an anti-competitive monolith.
It's not a charity, and it will still make bazillions, but leveraging their incumbency means they are both risk averse themselves and opportunity destroying for everyone else.
Is that actually true though? Googles forays into many markets were usually so horrible and clumsy that better companies could just use the media attention garnered to push their superior products.
Most Google beta products usually lack fundamental features, are geoblocked and completely ignore user voice. I haven't seen many of them really thrive over their better managed competition.
A small company with a successful, functioning project is getting a little bit of traction when Google crashes into the market. Google bids up staff costs, uses free advertising to get customer mindshare, scares off the small company's possible investors, and acts as a huge distraction.
After stumbling around for a while, Google gives up, but in the meantime, they've put the small company out of business.
Of course, the small company might get extra attention which they can use to their advantage, but it will be hard.
I doubted that but you're right:
The things they're great at by simply being such a behemoth with a ton of infrastructure willing to give away a lot for free or where their AI expertise comes in handy.
Search, obviously. The ads network. Competitors for Gmail are way smaller but they exist, since you don't need network effect, thankfully. Google Photos – I knew a startup that was developing a similar product for a year and then Photos launches and they decided to give up, because they couldn't match the free tier or provide enough justification for a paid product. Of course you need to be giant to take a shot at something like Stadia.
But you can compete with almost everything else. Notion, Airtable and Coda are fine, even though it'd be smart for Google to finally add a new, more modern product to Workplace. Google Tasks hasn't killed a single task manager. Google+ killed neither Facebook nor Snapchat.
Just read some stories from the founder of Waze: https://marker.medium.com/why-theres-no-such-thing-as-a-star...
This would severely dilute their brand though. All of these tech companies are implicitly promising unknown future magic through the power of technology, eventually. If Google admits that the peak of their business has come and they are now a boring mature company ("nothing but rabbits come out of the hat"), I can't see their stonk price nor their mindshare with early adopters doing well.
There is an inflection point the OP makes about resource cursed economies, which is that when you have money coming out of the ground, you don't need to provide anything to your citizens in exchange for their tax base, and you get tyranny, because you don't need to pay anyone except the army to keep you in power.
By extension, Google could just flip the EVIL switch that they so strenuously tried to protect, and it would have zero negative effect on their bottom line. They don't have to produce anything else to maintain their dominant position, and this is the danger the OP I think has illustrated.
Adsense/Adwords spews tens of billions of dollars in profits every year. No new product launch can come to close moving the needle on revenue or profits for Google. Google's political economy incentivizes groups to build new products not for their revenue streams but to claim larger bonuses of the ad-revenue pie. The users who buy into these "new" products are just cannon fodder in that game. Remember Google+? Vic Gundotra made off with probably tens of millions or more to launch a failed product because it was seen as strategic for Google. Anything and everything in Google happens as an internal battle between groups jockeying for bigger share of the adsense/adwords pie. We are just pawns in the game.
I can't believe I am saying it but almost anything MSFT releases in response to Google or competitors is inferior but MSFT's products are preferable due to implied longevity. MSFT has inoculated themselves against this parasitic political economy while Google's users are held hostage by it.
Most Google project launches are akin to MBS's dreams to turn Saudi into a tourism/research/commerce powerhouse. Brand new Cities in the desert etc. They would have more success dumping cash into the ocean and catching the fish that come to feed on the paper.
Ditto for google.
Yes, precisely. MSFT spent the better part of 50 years honing its selling strategies to companies, and knows how to deliver products. They may suck (and they do), but you know if you build upon them, they will not (generally, with few exceptions) disappear tomorrow. You simply cannot have that faith with google.
Gmail, could literally disappear at any moment. How screwed over would we all be if that happened? It won't, because it is the gift that keeps on giving with regards to intelligence gathering. For their real product.
Reams of data means both depth and scale. Missing either one would mean an early death.
People have been predicting the downfall of Google for a very long time now and yet they have never been bigger growing every year at astounding rates.
I think the issue is that Google, at the high level, is incapable of thinking long term. It wants to see runaway success in a quarter or two.
Your argument (that Google currently has a portfolio of products that are a net loss) shows that they at least try. In particular, GCP and Waymo are really long-term and strategic investments.
Some analysts I follow (I think Ben Thompson was in this camp) have been long speculating that it was actually operating at a loss.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/03/google-still-isnt-telling-us...
I would say that YouTube, GMail, and Google Maps are all direct funnels into the Adsense machine.
Android, Chrome, and Chromebooks see success only as instruments to have infrastructure to more efficiently push users to use the Google products to direct data into the Adsense machine.
Any Google product that does not sufficiently funnel user data into the Adsense machine is canned. GCP exists as a covinient way to make some side money on their existing infrastructure.
I think only Waymo is the true outlier in this case, but I think that lives as it's own thing, given that's under Alphabet instead of Google proper.
I remember hype around the Facebook Phone and Facebook Email, but that's about it really. Email didn't really feel like a death either as the rest of Messenger continued to evolve to what it became today.
And while Waymo might have an insane potential, it is just that, a potential.
Why do you say they are in a "pretty rough spot"?
https://cloud.google.com/press-releases
HN may have differing opinions, but Google’s Cloud business is likely their next big business. They’ve been growing quite rapidly, I doubt it will join the graveyard.
I've gone back repeatedly. I keep accepting the free trial for three months without their incredibly annoying and hostile ads, and then cancel before it charges me because I'd rather walk on hot coals than give Google or it's ilk money.
90% of the YouTube ads I get are just for a freaking keylogger[1] anyways.
[1] Grammarly is a keylogger, it logs every keystroke you make and sends it to their cloud service. Fair warning.
I thought it was AWS Azure GCP
They are good at camouflaging inequality and other things. The lower classes get enough to get by, so it isn't obvious. The rich don't brag, wear cheap suits and look like regular people.
But the old-money royalty is obvious, and probably just very good at hiding corruption.
Most lists I've seen rank the Dutch as having low levels of inequality and high standards of living.
I keep seeing this, and it isn't true. (Not yet at least.)
Google shut down its game studios (which never released anything anyway), but is continuing to support 3rd party developers releasing their games on Stadia.
Google didn't have the patience for their own studio to bear fruit, so it doesn't bode well for them to have patience with the platform, much less invest in it.
This but also: what signal does this send to the consumer to whom Google abandoning services is already a running joke. Would anyone knowing about this now buy a game on Stadia that they can only play on that very shaky platform?
Even though it might not be true that they're shutting it down, it for sure sends a strong signal that they intend to.
There are few organizations that make it past any long range of time and when they do they’re well past their hay day, whether is Std Oil, Dutch East India, Exxon ,etc. Folks at Basecamp will lose their steam similarly when DHH leaves too and stops giving a fuck. It’ll happen to Apple, Amazon and Google. It’s the natural cycle.
Nintendo isn't a tech company, they're a publisher which so happens to publish their properties mostly as games, and do a remarkably good job of producing consoles which you need to buy to enjoy their properties. This is why they'll still be around in 100 years, and Microsoft and Apple most likely won't.
I wonder if a part of that longevity is the org/incentives structure.
And (cynically) maybe just that regulation entrenches existing finance players and there isn't anywhere near as much anti-trust conversation over there.
That said, the analogy breaks down. Petro-states have other issues: weak institutions, corruption. Their lucrative revenue steam, unlike online ads at least so far, is also very volatile with boom and bust cycles. It also creates all sorts of weird economic distortions, like exchange rate effects that make it hard to invest in other industries.
And finally, GCP, Waymo, Android and many others beg to differ. Yes, Google still depends primarily on Ads, but it's far from being the Venezuela or Iraq of companies.
GCP is still flailing around trying to find solid ground. After multiple fits and starts, with Kurian at the helm they're at least making an attempt to attract enterprises, but their inability to commit to a product in the consumer division has ABSOLUTELY tarnished their reputation with the enterprise.
>Waymo, Android
Waymo and Android have only survived because they feed the advertising beast. Don't kid yourself into believing either one would still exist if they didn't.
The reason google can't make a decent messaging app is because by definition, people want their messages to be private. Google can't data mine and let you have privacy - it's why allo literally died DURING the product announcement because someone caught wind that they were going to do encrypted chats that couldn't be data mined. And instead they're trying to push RCS - without encryption - that nobody wants besides them and the mobile companies who also want to data mine.
Everything about a petro state seems to apply here. As for google not having weak institutions and corruption, I'd say they just do a better job of covering it up than most petro states. See: Andy Rubin.
Anyway, petro states depend on a single source of depletable revenue. They even fail at all attempts to expand up the value chain around services or refining of their oil. Even if Google's only successes are around furthering their ads revenue, that's still a far cry from petro states.