> Google Apps and Google Maps are both huge presences in the tech economy. Are they paying for themselves, or are they using search advertising revenue as rocket fuel? Nobody outside Google knows.
Arguably Apple also learned the lesson of how valuable Google Maps is. Direct ad revenue from maps is not the only source of revenue. Maps is a key feature of Android phones, (and iOS really) and Android OS is valuable due as a source of search engine traffic. And the money search engine traffic makes is able to invest in more improvements in Maps.
> The online advertising business has become a Facebook/Google duopoly which is destroying ad-supported publishing and thus intellectually impoverishing the whole population
There is a pretty insightful twitter thread from a journalism prof I can't find just now that made a persuasive case that newspapers killed themselves. They had 30 percent margins in the 90's and instead of adding staff and growing the business they focused on cost cutting. Ad-supported publishers kinda did this to themselves, and it was craigslist who knifed their cash cow (classifieds). And really, Craigslist sat on its ass too.
> The world needs Google Cloud to be viable because it needs more than two public-cloud providers.
IDK how Tim thinks public clouds are funded. Cloud vendors have massive startup costs -- every server you buy takes years of customer billing to pay off -- and I don't think anyone is gonna be down for a bond issue for 'we promise to just be like Google but smaller' spinoffs. I can name a dozen public cloud venders[1], but none have any where near the clout. And yet for some reason Tim isn't talking about why Amazon is a near monopoly.
> the real reason Android exists is that Google needs mobile advertising not to become an Apple monopoly.
This is the same reason Apple Maps exists (and dozens of other services you've never heard of). I have no idea what breaking up Android would accomplish though; Android Inc would pretty much have to replicate the same state of affairs via contracts with Alphabet, with diminished ability to integrate. It's super weird that Nokia face planted a decade ago in their role of providing a third option.
> What we do know is that people who try to make a living as YouTubers sure do complain a lot about arbitrary, ham-handed changes of monetization and content policy.
I don't see how a spinoff saves Youtubers any grief. Tim's general thesis is that Google should spin off it's services, watch the profitable ones thrive and let the break even (or worse) ones die off. If Youtube is a break even affair, I don't see how viewers or content producers benefits from less platform competition in the space. If it's capable of standing alone, what's the harm in Google owning it?
[1]: Google, Oracle, AliCloud, Azure, Rackspace, IBM/Softlayer, Digital Ocean, Saleaforce, VMWare, OVH, Hetzner, Linode,