> In January 2021, we completed an assessment of the useful lives of our servers and network equipment and adjusted the estimated useful life of our servers from three years to four years Does anyone know what the observation was here that made this possible? Have Google's internal workloads not grown in size as quickly as they thought, or is this a "Moore's law is slowing down" thing?
What you are seeing though is the trick they used to make 'net income' pop. Let's say they had a million servers and a server costs $5K each. When depreciated at 3 years that is $1.6 billion dollars a year of depreciation. But you stretch that out to 4 years and now its only $1.25 billion dollars in appreciation. Since depreciation is subtracted from revenue you just "bumped" up your revenue by $350M and you didn't have to do anything at all (except change how you treated your assets).
That they had to resort to this level of shenanigan to get their revenue numbers up is interesting to me.