I think what you’re missing is the long term trend.

Google’s cloud business looks great. I’ve always thought they should have completely focused on cloud - a company full of excellent engineers would always win there.

But its main income stream is advertising, and AI is an existential threat. Google is far behind Anthropic and OpenAI, so right now their advertising business is “default dead”, so to speak.

The company won’t die, but without a radical change in velocity it will be a shadow of its former self.