Rather than building a few great products, Google is instead throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks. As I’ve said many times before, it’s more of a Microsoft strategy than an Apple strategy. And it’s a poor move, in my opinion. Because Microsoft’s strategy has never worked, though it’s hard to tell when Microsoft’s monopoly cash cow allows it to keep spending R&D money like a drunken sailor. Google also has a nice cash cow in Search, but it risks squandering its dominance in that market in order to try and get into all these other things.
If you stop looking at the overall bottom line of the company, and just look at which individual products actually turn a profit, Microsoft and Google start looking a lot worse. Whereas you can literally look at ANY Apple product or service and see that it at least clears some sort of profit. Nothing Apple does is a loss leader, or a product that promises to make money somewhere in the distant future. That’s pretty impressive.
