You’ve just got to look back through history and you’ll see the same thing play out, and
controversially it’s not actually the worst play in the long run.
1) pick a high risk / high reward opportunity
2) invest heavily in the fundamental tech behind it and see if it works out
3) when it doesn’t work out, shut it down, take the tech you built and use it for something.
So for example, let’s look at dart.
There was never any way it was going to work, really…
but, at the time, maaaaybe, it could have worked. …and google would have owned the web stack entirely.
…but, they’ve put it to work in flutter now and that’s going ok.
The point I’m making is that if you look at this from the perspective of investment in fundamental technology (Ie. Steaming video say) what’s better?
A) develop it with no specific use case
B) work really hard on a very difficult use case that might end up failing
If you can afford it, the latter is maybe not the worst way of doing it.
You end up with battle tested technology and no users to bother you for the made-in-a-rush service you made to go with it.
You could easily argue that more successfully outcomes could come from less risky investments… but do you want 50 kind of bleh services in your portfolio?
I don’t think google does. They want a few unicorns.
You don’t get unicorns by playing it safe.
So… I’m not saying it’s the right strategy, or even a good one, but from that perspective you can see why you’d try.
Bet: we’ll see something fancy using the streaming tech roll out eventually, probably linked to a more successful existing product, it will be unremarkable and well liked by most people.