Google seems to be falling into a similar pattern with it's many different attempts at chat apps
Android, Flutter, ChromeOS, PWA, Fuchsia...
Feel like using the NDK on Android?
Legacy gradle plugin, Gradle stable plugin with cmake, ndk-build or eventually the new C/C++ support being developed by Gradle.
Ah, and then there is Blaze as well.
Is there any benefit to their career to undertake maintenance?
Here is relevant read: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/27/alphabet-investors-voice-sea...
Amazon's got this figured out. Some significant portion of voice commands are:
-User sees they've run out of widgets
-User says "Alexa, order some widgets"
Having the ability to drive that traffic to one store or another is a big advantage that stores will pay for.
Take a look at Google's earnings. in 2017 Google made $95 billion from ads, and $14.2 billion from "other revenue". Which is classified as:
Other Revenue: Apps, in-app purchases, and digital content in the Google Play store; Google Cloud offerings; and Hardware.
So Google is making money from other places, just not near as much as Ads yet.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/01/google-cloud-revenue-passes-...
Just as a stray example, for 3Q17 Alphabet generated $7.8 billion in operating income.
Google, the subsidiary, generated $8.7 billion in operating income for that quarter.
With continued solid growth of Google's cloud business, and the pull back on burning red ink on Google Fiber, maybe they'll push that other category to break-even soon. Regardless, Google is generating all of their profit. Google is a cash production marvel, nearly on par with the iPhone at this point. They should be able to hit around $40 billion in operating income in that subsidiary this year.
They just create things that are useful.
Search, GMail, Maps, Chrome, Android, Youtube, Analytics and many other products and services.
If they can milk them from advertising, they will. But they don't necessarily care if it doesn't make money directly.
They own so many crucial parts of the internet that they cannot become irrelevant like Yahoo did.
Compare that to similar companies.
Facebook has only Facebook.com, Whatsapp and Instagram (which is basically just Facebook)
Amazon their store and AWS. Their other attempts (phone, tablets, Alexa, etc) have never took off.
Microsoft is in a powerful position as they have Windows, Office, Azure, XBox and Bing although they have not managed to gain share in new markets for quite some time.
I think Google is by far the most relevant company on the internet.
They gain market and the cash will flow later. This is in their DNA. This is how exactly it got started for them.
Their search was popular but was not making money for years. All they did was to focus on making it better, thinking that they'll find a way to make money later. And they did.