Except Google's core competency is software. Google has the advantage of being essentially controlled by Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

They only need one of those things to succeed (cars). It's hard to imagine that one of the existing car companies has developed a reliable urban self-driving, that is better than Google's.

Google's fiber play has nothing to do with actually making money. It is about making sure that cable companies abide by net neutrality and not cutoff or strangle Google's bandwidth intensive services like YouTube.