Reddit is chipping away the Q&A search, but time will tell if it has a similar downfall to quora/yahoo-answers.
I’ve seen TikTok lead in educational search, cooking, gardening etc. TikTok could potentially overtake YouTube all together over next 5-10years.
Google maps isn’t as far ahead as it once was. Apple caught up.
Then you got Microsoft whos teams and office suite whicj caught up and surpassed google’s office products (for what enterprise buyers care on)
Leaving what. GCP as their only disruptive marketshare product area? And GCP while high margin isn’t nearly as high margin as their ads businesses. For GCP to be profitable they need to severely cut wages for cost center roles. A PgM in GCP shouldn’t be making 300k when AWS and Azure spend just 200k on the same role.
Finally you’ve got the money pit of waymo, X, and the bets. All of them have neither a real path to profitability nor compelling return on investment.
Id say the investors are right. Google is the new IBM, return profits to shareholders so they can invest them in more fruitful endeavors.