Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has since moved on to greener and perhaps more dangerous pastures, told an audience of Stanford students recently that “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.” Evidently this hot take was not for wider consumption, as Stanford — which posted the video this week on YouTube — today made the video of the event private.
Also the ads are just so obscenely profitable that anything else will always just be a small side project. Google ad revenue is $200 billion/year.
If a new product has revenue of $500 million/year it’s still peanuts that are just a distraction and can be canceled with zero impact.