They are doing a poor job of diversifying. Those side businesses are producing a small amount of revenue. It would be one thing if the profits hadn't caught up, the real problem is there isn't much in the way of sales to begin with. I see no example business of theirs that will get them even moderately diversified off of online advertising in the next five years. And I'm not speaking of technology Alphabet is messing with - what business are they looking to capture in self-driving cars for example? I see no example of an actual business there so far.
Granted, this only matters in the scenario in which their online advertising business contracts meaningfully (whether due to ad-blockers or otherwise). If ad-blockers gain usage at an accelerating pace, Google is unlikely to have much time to diversify (and that takes a long time when you're talking $20b in sales to off-set).
So far Google has been flaky, disorganized and unprincipled about developing other real businesses. They should have a dramatically larger cloud services business for example, but they handled that incompetently and ceded years and tons of ground to AWS.
Essentially Google has to spend the next several years praying that ad-blockers don't rapidly bring their spigot of online ad dollars to an end. That's a real bad position to have put yourself in if you're a $536 billion corporation.
Granted, this only matters in the scenario in which their online advertising business contracts meaningfully (whether due to ad-blockers or otherwise). If ad-blockers gain usage at an accelerating pace, Google is unlikely to have much time to diversify (and that takes a long time when you're talking $20b in sales to off-set).
So far Google has been flaky, disorganized and unprincipled about developing other real businesses. They should have a dramatically larger cloud services business for example, but they handled that incompetently and ceded years and tons of ground to AWS.
Essentially Google has to spend the next several years praying that ad-blockers don't rapidly bring their spigot of online ad dollars to an end. That's a real bad position to have put yourself in if you're a $536 billion corporation.