Interesting. Could you comment a little further? I can see the analogy here to advertising making their other products appear less competitive internally, but it sounds like you may have further thoughts.
It doesn't go too much further than that. The value of their employees is best spent on facilitating more ad clicks so without a decree from the top stating "we are pivoting" and having the political capital to follow through with that, they're stuck.
Microsoft is so exceptionally lucky they found Satya Nadella. Saying "yes we make untold amounts of money on this but it cannot be our focus moving forward" is almost impossibly difficult. Heck, just look at Norway. They want us to look at them as some post-carbon futureland with their Teslas but everything there is tier-2 compared to oil. They're a petrostate in the same way that Google is an adtech company no less grimy than Facebook, no matter how "not evil" they are.
Except Azure is the new thing that makes MS untold amounts of money via the same lock-in effect created by windows/office. It‘s adjacent business basically.
Culturally it was much more difficult for Google to create a functioning cloud business, even though the tech is in it‘s nature.
A better comparison would be Xbox for MS. Or AWS for Amazon. It‘s quite surprising that xbox wasn‘t cancelled or sold off, really. It was close. Someone has to advocate for these things. Even if you‘re a company making 50 billion a year. From the outside you have to either look enigmatically mysterious and visionary. Or you have to be cost-conscious and focused.
Indeed. I think one of Google's big problems is that it has a finance division desperate to prove to the market how rational it is, with a huge mass of project managers and leaders from the Gmail days who believe you can launch any old crap and take five years to iterate it into something good.
