Comment by InclinedPlane

Precisely. Both google drive and youtube have the potential to be businesses that are each on their own as influential, as important, and as profitable as google is in its entirety currently. But google doesn't have the drive, or the need, to put in the work to make them such. Instead they just sort of piddle along with half-assed improvements as time goes by. And really at some point some other competitor is going to put enough of its own pieces together to eat google's lunch and then they'll be on the sidelines. Google is only unassailable because the rest of the industry is even more dysfunctional, not because it's so strong. That's also true of Apple and facebook and Microsoft and so many other tech giants.