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> A startup or hobbyist can build something that costs Google several million dollars in a weekend.

They genuinely cant. They can make a sorta kinda prototype of something that costs Google several million dollars.

You're right that a hobbyist couldn't build something like search or maps or docs in a weekend, but a lot of what Google ships is boring webapps. And I promise that they are really hard to ship: approvals are annoying and time-consuming, and the infrastructure is designed for scalability and performance, not flexibility or iteration speed.

There's a joke inside Google that Google infra makes easy things hard and impossible things possible.

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