... or they just have vision, like companies of old times used to (HP, Xerox, IBM).

IBM has done basic science research like few companies ever have and nobody can claim they're planning to replace their current lines of business with electron microscopes or Watsons.

Better to use your resources while you have them to try to ensure your survival rather than nonsense like stock buybacks. If investors don't like it, they're welcome to buy an Alcoa or P&G or any other bluechip monolith.

Investing a lot of money in something that won't payoff for 10 years or so probably means they're not desperate.

Perhaps it looks that way to someone who doesn't understand anything about business, but there are easier ways to make money than investing in a lot of long-term research that might not pay off.

Or supplement it at the very least. The profitability they enjoy with advertising is hard to achieve in any other existing industry, so they try to be a front runner for new industries: Self-driving cars, robotics and green energy.

That is not to say they do not believe in the ad business. For the ad business the model seems to have moved towards getting more people online and have them do more online. Google put a smartphone into a billion hands. They wire up African and American cities to fiber. They made browsers far more capable and performant. They plan to fly balloons over the whole globe. All investments connected to the online business.

If you can get 45 billion pa out of robots in the next fiscal, please tell me how and I will help :-)

Yes, of course they are, but they have the luxury of telling the ad world, actually you have as much as you can get, there is no more growth there, pay up for a decade till someone beats us, by which time robots and cars and space stuff ...

Does it need to be something new? Imagine robots helping people out with menial tasks while trying to sell them stuff.