Because Google would then become a business with virtually no revenue - and no chance of producing revenue. Even though Alphabet itself would remain just as profitable, a business organization can't survive long if its goals are not in some ways associated with producing revenue, by the nature of how corporate politics work.
>Because Google would then become a business with virtually no revenue - and no chance of producing revenue.
kagi.com bets on becoming a business with revenue. In the same way, Google could start asking money for searches without ads.
In the long run, Google should make more money because a society that runs on the best available information will be more valuable. The information market will be bigger and thus Google's income should be bigger.
The problem is that it's too easy to pitch advertisers against each other and force them to pay a huge fraction of their profits. On the other hand, profit margins in a transparent market are small.
Google could become something like Bloomberg and sell their good information to companies for high margins.
Maybe if google wasn't so beholden on the ad revenue, they could pursue more interesting opportunities for revenue. Imagine a first rate aws competiter that wasn't Azure and the headache that system is in comparison. that alone would generate conversions overnight. Then you can use some of that infrastructure you've just built and your customers are paying for to run your own science division that could research anything and everything with free compute.
If you have basically a free money generator, why aren't you putting that in a room to run and make its free money while you work on a second or third free money generator?
That's true, but as long as you have one money generator that takes a lot of pressure off of you to go and set up another one. Not to mention having to put resources on maintaining the money generator versus just having more people pursuing innovation, increasing the odds you hit on another money generator.
There is no such thing as guaranteed or overnight conversions to a new cloud, at least not from the relevant segment of the market (enterprise). They would have to invest massively in B2B sales and actual human support (which they have an institutional aversion to) to make any more of a dent in this market then they already have.
OTOH everywhere I've worked has bought licenses both to MS office products and the google analogs. Dropox too. Enterprises buy things if a big name comes and markets it to them. If wind catches that everyone is also buying slack/google drive/whatever, the people in charge of buying enterprise software jump like lemmings. It's insane. Why does every job I join with more than 100 employees pay for three commercial cloud storage providers??? Software salespeople must be really good at their job these days.
