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Comment by joshuamorton | Hacker News Reader

> but ~90% of their other products exist for the sole purpose of driving business to their ads products.

This is flatly false. While certainly, many of the products are used in ads, yes, very few products exist for the sole purpose of driving ads business. A few examples of things that don't: Drive, Docs, Gmail (GSuite/B2B), GCE (B2B again), ML, TF, etc. (again, B2B offerings, as well as being used for all sorts of internal things that have nothing to do with ads), Youtube (Red, TV), etc.

While many things certainly drive ads revenue, there are very few things that you could argue exist solely, or even mostly, to drive ads revenue.

(Am Googler)

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But I never said 100% of Google products exist to drive revenue to Ads, I said most do, ie, most free products.

We are not talking about B2B or B2C products for obvious reasons.

Outside of B2B and B2C offering (ie, Gsuite and Youtube RED), both youtube and Gmail makes money from ads. Docs is part of the Drive and Drive with Gmail share same free space limit. Drive is free tier to their B2C offering (pay money for more space). Just like Dropbox has a free tier. Docs is a feature of a drive - which they needed to compete with other similar services.

TF is used as a paid service (along with TPU) for their GCE, also TF is a great marketing tool to hire top-notch machine learning enthusiast to their company. Nothing wrong with that.

According to this (not sure how accurate this is): https://www.statista.com/statistics/266471/distribution-of-g...

Google still accounts close to ~90 of their revenue from ads. The good news is that it looks like their diversification plan is working.

I have nothing against Google or their employees, I think it's an awesome company, I would rather live in a world where Google exists. Regardless of their profit motive, it would be hard to ignore their contribution to make the internet a better place.

But "100% of Google products exist to drive revenue to ads" would probably have been more correct than what you originally said, which was

>but ~90% of their other products exist for the sole purpose of driving business to their ads products.

Machine learning at Google, for example, is a product that exists to, among other things, drive revenue to ads. It is not however a product that exists solely to drive revenue to ads.

As soon as you say "we are not talking about B2B or B2C products", you've made a tautological argument. What you're saying is that "all of the Google products which don't make money via other methods make money via ads". Which is trivially true, but also totally uninteresting.

My point was that the original statement you made was a hyperbole: there are not very many Google products which exist, as you stated, "for the sole purpose of driving business to [ads]". Most Google products have other revenue generation methods. That's all.

One thing which I have adored about Google is X labs ( now part of Alphabet.) very few people are like Larry,Sergey who have the audacity to diversify. They are highly scientific-minded, I see Google/Alphabet both as a tech co and a research , experimentation co. That's what differentiates them from others. Sure, when they fail their success% goes down, but the knowledge acquired by scientific community goes up as a lot of Googlers go on to start their own cos.

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