It's not like Jeff couldnt invest to make better software than elastic. They have the money. Theyd just rather feast off Elastic's plate until Elastic is dead.
It's not generally considered a wise business move to wait until your corpse is already being feasted upon before changing direction.
Long term they absolutely would have been killed - computing is being consolidated onto one of 4 platforms, all of which would squeeze out elastic using their market dominance as leverage.
May Amazon feast on their rotting open and free corpse, eh?
I don't read Drew's comment that way at all. He's pointing out correctly that they were well resourced, and had built a $.628 Billion revenue business (at the time). Well done.
Incidentally Since the change, they've grown to just north of $800M, so Elastic is still growing, but that growth is significantly slower than in years prior, so evidence supports Drew's assertion. Had Elastic done something different, they may have had more or less success.
Perhaps you missed the part where he tried to imply that they were swimming in profit by stating their revenue and sweeping the cost of paying for the development of this software under the carpet.
Chasing 10x is a choice, not a force of nature.