Earlier quoted context omitted.
> focusing on making actual useful products A 'product' is something you sell to clients. Google's only product is advertising, and they don't need to focus on making better advertising because they are a monopoly. Everything else Google does is just a smokescreen for investors and a creeping fear that they won't be able to exist in a post-monopoly world.
> Google's only product is advertising, Google's main product is user attention, which they sell to advertisers in the form of advertising. Right now, they farm this attention mostly through web search, but hone it through data they collect with other venues, such as e.g. location and other data collected from Android handsets, the vast tentacles of Google Analytics, Google DNS, G-Suite (GMail, G Docs, G Drive, ...)…
Not true. Their advertising business is absolutely built on network effects. Advertisers advertise where there is user data (anything else is a money losing proposition), and lots of user data collection only happens in services that have the money to host (and curate) a large search index, which in turn needs a healthy and growing ad business.
It's a self-serving cycle that eventually leads to one player becoming the monopoly.
(Same deal with social networks, though less pronounced.)