Alphabet Inc.

Transcript: (disclaimer: may contain unintentionally confusing, inaccurate and/or amusing transcription errors)

David: Are you intentionally wearing a black turtleneck for this one?

Ben: No. It is actually going to be one of my carve outs, though.

David: Amazing.

Ben: Why, you think I dress up like Steve Jobs for a Google episode?

David: Well, I thought because of the war between Android and…

Ben: I walk in and there’s this smirk on your face. All right, let’s do it.

Ben: Welcome to the summer 2025 season of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I’m Ben Gilbert.

David: I’m David Rosenthal.

Ben: And we are your hosts. In the late 1990s, Google built the best search engine for the rapidly growing internet. With a breakthrough search algorithm, low cost servers based on commodity hardware, and the best business model of all time—search ads—they turned that search engine into a cash gushing business and took it public in 2004.

But then curiously, they started doing some things that weren’t related to search. They launched a breakthrough email service in your browser with Gmail, Maps that were far superior to the current state-of-the-art, Docs and Spreadsheets with real-time collaboration for the first time. Of course, YouTube, then Android in their own web browser with Chrome.

Astonishingly, today Google has 15 products with over half a billion users, 7 of those have over 2 billion users. David, that is over 25% of humans use 7 of Google’s products.

David: Just unreal. Can’t wait to tell all of these stories today.

Ben: And they’ve also launched some colossal failures—Google+ to try to compete with Facebook, Google Wave, Buzz, and about half a dozen messaging apps, I don’t know, maybe a dozen messaging apps over the years. Hot air balloons to provide wireless internet. And of course…

David: Oh man, I forgot about the hot air balloons.

Ben: Google Glass.

David: Can’t forget about that one, unfortunately.

Ben: Why did they do all this? And as a business, Google was and still is the company that makes the vast majority of their money from ads on search results on the web. Today, we tell the story of Google as the innovation factory of the 2000s, their reorganization into the parent company, Alphabet, and how all these different products cleverly serve different business purposes. And also, how it feeds into Google’s original core mission to organize the world’s information. We’ll end this episode story right at the dawn of the AI era.

David: Woo hoo hoo. Oh, you’re giving away the end.

Ben: Oh spoilers, sorry. Is Google a search engine? Is it the platform company of the web era? Or is it an incubator that just happens to have struck gold with search and perhaps AI? Today we dive in.

Well listeners, if you want to know every time an episode drops or get early hints at what the next episode will be, check out our email list. That’s also where we share corrections and updates about previous episodes. And we are adding a new bonus. You get to help us vote on future episode topics. The first poll is going out soon. Sign up now at acquired.fm/email.

Join the Slack if you want to come talk about this with us and the whole Acquired community, acquired.fm/slack. Before we dive in, we want to briefly thank our presenting partner, J.P. Morgan Payments.

David: Just like how we say every company has a story, every company story is powered by payments, and J.P. Morgan Payments is a part of so many of their journeys, from seed to IPO and beyond.

Ben: With that, this show is not investment advice. David and I may have investments in the companies we discuss, and this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. David, where are we starting this Alphabet story?

David: I have a very, very fun beginning for you, Ben. I want to start with a quote from Russ Hanneman.

Ben: The fictional character?

David: From Silicon Valley, HBO show. Oh yeah, from the TV show.

Ben: Awesome.

David: And the quote is, “If you show revenue, people will ask how much? And it will never be enough. The company that was the hundred-Xer, the thousand-Xer is suddenly the 2x dog. But if you have no revenue, you can say you’re pre-revenue, you’re a potential pure play. It’s not about how much you earn, it’s about what you’re worth. And who’s worth the most? Companies that lose money.”

Immortal words of wisdom for the technology world. God, that show was so good. Why do I bring this up? Why do I start here?

Ben: Why are you talking about this? Google is a cash gushing machine.

David: Revenue is obviously not the problem for Google. But what was the problem in 2004, 2005, 2006 was being viewed as, in Russ’s terms, pure play.

When Google went public in fall of 2004, the stock shot up, basically doubled in two months. Wall Street loved Google. AdWords, the search business model, everybody had to own shares. Google had cracked the code on monetizing the Internet. The more people use the Internet, the more they searched. The more they searched, the more money Google makes. Simple, easy, pure play, you might say.

That is until Google announced fourth quarter, 2005 earnings. Full year 2005 revenue, $6.1 billion. That’s almost double the $3.1 billion that it was in 2004, the first year it went public. But earnings are flat. Profitability is down. Google’s now investing in all these new products and services. Gmail, Maps, the forthcoming Google Docs. Later this year in 2006, they would buy YouTube for $1.6 billion. Wall Street hates this, hates it.

Ben: It this is a huge amount of their cash they’re putting back on the table and betting for the future.

David: So this is January, 2006, the stock falls 27%. Wall Street’s like God, these guys, what are they doing? They’re messing it up.

Steven Levy writes in In the Plex that the perception of Google’s ventures beyond search at the time was that the company was tossing balls into the air like a drunken juggler. They were a pure play in investors’ eyes, and now they’re messing it up. They’re adding all these other stuff. They don’t want the other stuff.

Then Ben, as you teed up in the intro, the question is why did they do all this? And I think the way to answer it is to start and just tell the stories of all the individual products.

Ben: Let’s do it. Strap in. I will say, David, doing the research took me way back to early Acquired grading acquisitions. This is the cornucopia of hits of iconic product launches in tech history.

David: The first and probably the most important here because it sets the stage for everything else, the first major non-search product was on April 1st, April Fool’s Day 2004, Gmail. The most famous infamous non-joke April Fool’s Day announcement of all time.

But it sure sounded like a joke. Here’s the announcement in 2004. “Entirely web-based email in your browser. You can log in and access it anywhere, on any device. Google search is built-in. You don’t need to spend all this time sorting your mail into folders anymore, and one gigabyte of storage free. No need to delete your mail, no need to clean up your inbox, no need to do anything, ever.” And the whole thing is free.

Of course, this sounds like a joke. This is too good to be true.

Ben: The universe at the time is Microsoft sells enterprise-grade mail for a lot of money, or there are all these free web-based services popping up like Hotmail that Microsoft would end up buying, Yahoo Mail, and AOL. You get five megabytes of storage.

David: Not even at the time, Hotmail, which as you said Microsoft owns, had two megabytes of free storage, and Yahoo Mail had four megabytes.

There’s another great story from In the Plex that Steven Levy has. He’s interviewing Bill Gates at the Newsweek headquarters office in New York shortly after Gmail comes out. They started talking about Gmail and Bill can’t believe it. He’s offended by Gmail because he thinks that giving people all this storage is just wasteful. You’re doing email wrong. It’s morally repugnant to leave all of this email sitting on the servers.

I was thinking about it. Until Gmail, the paradigm for email, people treated it like regular physical mail. You sort it, you file away the important stuff, you throw out the pieces you don’t need anymore. Even freaking Bill Gates operates this way.

Gmail is radical. This is a radical notion of how email should work. It was also correct. If you sat and you thought about it in (say) 2001 or so when Gmail starts getting worked on within Google, and you thought about the combination of the growth of the Internet, which obviously Google has a front row seat to, and Moore’s Law, you would logically come to this conclusion that the cost of sending, storing, and searching email would as methodically go to zero. Thus, as that happened, a whole lot more email was going to be sent in the world.

Ben: Can I tell you my understanding of where this story starts in 1996?

David: Oh, I was going to go back to 1999, but yeah, go for it.

Ben: I know you’re about to bring up the name Paul Buchheit, is that right?

David: Of course, yeah.

Ben: Paul was kind enough to speak with me before recording this episode, Paul famously the inventor of Gmail. In 1996, Paul was a student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, which, you may also know this, David, famously was one of the—

David: Ohio Strong.

Ben: Yes, the first campuses in the nation to have broadband internet in the dorms and all over campus.

David: Okay. I do about the Paul fascination with Webmail starting in college. But I didn’t realize that Case Western had broadband.

Ben: This is why, when you’re living in the universe of broadband everywhere, he was living like 15 years in the future, temporarily, for four years in college.

David: 1996.

Ben: Yes. He realizes email is a bummer if it’s a thing that you download and lives on your computer. The information should just exist at my fingertips all the time. Bits are becoming free to move around.

He gets obsessed with this idea in college that email should exist on the web, in a browser, without ever having to download it. He builds a prototype for Webmail when he’s in college.

In 2001, famously pre-IPO at Google, Larry Page feels like Google is moving a little bit too slow, and gets rid of all engineering managers. Larry and Wayne Rosing, who is leading engineering, go and meet with each engineer individually to talk about ideas that they could work on.

This tells you so much about Googleyness, but it also tells you a lot about the caliber of the engineers they were hiring at the time, where they would just approach them and say, what ideas are you thinking about? Here’s some ideas we have. Can you just full stack own this product entirely yourself?

So in Paul’s meeting, they knew about his previous interest in email and web-based mail. They float this amorphous idea to him, and that’s where it comes from.

David: Ah, so Larry and Wayne suggested it to him. Interesting.

Ben: Here’s some other stuff that Paul said. Part of the motivation was that they were looking to make something that would make Google stickier. You’d have this ongoing relationship for, if there was a next Google after Google, there was some reason why you would still have a relationship.

David: Which obviously Yahoo would have for many, many years, even though there was a next Yahoo after Yahoo and Google.

Ben: We still get emails from people with Yahoo Mail.

David: Do you know how Paul found out about Google in 1999?

Ben: Oh, no

David: Slashdot.

Ben: Really? That’s awesome.

David: Then he sends an email to jobs@google.com.

Ben: Unbelievable.

David: Fitting that he gets hired with an email. So 2001, Paul gets to work with encouragement from Larry and Wayne.

Ben: Do you know what the original seed of the code is?

David: Oh, no. Go for it.

Ben: Google had just bought a company called Deja News, their first acquisition. It was the corpus of all the old Usenet posts.

David: Oh, yeah. Then this becomes Google Groups, right?

Ben: That’s exactly right.

David: And Paul’s working on that.

Ben: And part of that was a feature to do realtime indexing of all the posts that would allow you to search the whole corpus. Paul just applies that to his own personal inbox. The first instantiation of this is just a search box to search his personal Unix mail directory as if it is the old Usenet posts that they had just bought. That’s the first version of Gmail.

David: Amazing. As he’s building on that, though, obviously the first thing he needs is a web front or an interface. Okay, Hotmail’s out there, Yahoo Mail’s out there, web mail’s out there. It sucks for a lot of reasons. There’s got to be a way to make it better, make it more performance, and better to use as a webpage. He’s playing around with JavaScript and what he can do with JavaScript to make this web application of email better.

The history of JavaScript is fascinating. Brendan Eich created it at Netscape back in 1995. We did a whole episode with Brendan years ago about this. The idea behind JavaScript was to include a programming language as part of web browsers so that people could make dynamic web pages instead of just static HTML documents.

The problem was, it was this casualty of the browser wars with Microsoft and Internet Explorer and everything that killed Netscape. So up until this time, 2001, JavaScript existed but it wasn’t super popular.

Ben: It wasn’t very powerful. You could do weird stuff like animate something on the page, but I would describe it as toy-like and not a real programming language for sure.

David: And for what the web was up until that point in time, you didn’t really need it. Static webpages are fine for most of what’s happening. Even google.com was static. You type a search into the search box, Google servers process the query, and they send you a whole new static webpage with the results.

But you’d imagine, for doing something like email on the web or any application on the web, you don’t want the site to reload every time you open a new email or you create a draft or you move something around in folders.

Ben: You might want to move from a website to a world of web applications.

David: Yeah, but this is how Hotmail and Yahoo Mail worked. Every time you took an action, it reloaded the page. So they were super slow. Paul’s like, maybe I can use JavaScript to make this better.

He’s working on it, and he discovers a little known feature of JavaScript called the XMLHttpRequest, which lets a webpage fetch automatically new XML data from a server without reloading the page. Paul’s like, oh my God. This is gold. This is the birth of AJAX—Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.

Ben: So David, I assumed you were going to go here. I thought that you’d get it all laid up.

David: You’ve been letting me go. You’ve just been feeding me a rope the whole time.

Ben: Are you trying to tell me that Gmail is the first AJAX application?

David: Well, the first widely-adopted around the world.

Ben: That’s fair to say.

David: It’s set the bar for what Dynamic Web 2.0 you might say websites could be.

Ben: The origin of the XMLHttpRequest is a part of Internet Explorer, first implemented by Microsoft, and used in this part of Outlook called Outlook Web Access.

David: I think I did know this.

Ben: When I worked for my high school, I could log in on any computer into my Outlook through their web access. That thing used AJAX, and I think it only worked in Internet Explorer. That is the origin of why this API exists in the first place, ironically for another mail client.

David: Not just for another mail client. It’s so deeply ironic that this originated for a Microsoft mail client. We’re going to get deep into that in just a minute here.

When Paul discovers this, this is almost like Google search all over again. When people realize what you can do to create something that looks and feels and has all the functionality of an application, that heretofore would’ve been a program that you installed on your personal computer.

Ben: A .EXE or a .APP on your Mac.

David: That maybe you downloaded from the Internet, but more likely you went to a retail shop like CompUSA or something, installed on your computer, that you can now just do this in a web browser? This is incredible.

Ben: The web is the platform of the future.

David: Yup. So Paul builds the prototype, shows it to Larry and Sergey. They’re super jazz. Supposedly, Larry and Sergey become the first beta users of Gmail. They are the seed Gmail users, and they start using it exclusively as their mail service within Google.

By the time it launches publicly, all of Google is on Gmail, using it, addicted to it, and it wasn’t called this at the time, but it’s in the cloud. You don’t have to have your mail stored on your machine or a specific server. You can log in, access it anywhere, on any network, any device.

Ben: All this stuff sounds so boring, but it was completely breakthrough.

David: Obviously, Larry and Sergey are jazzed, first because of just the incredible nature of this product. Larry especially, he is a product person, his view is if we can build a better product and it’s on the web, then it’s good for Google and we should do it. That is a huge part of the motivation underlying Gmail and everything we’re going to talk about.

But there’s also another reason, and that’s Microsoft. Google was doing great printing money—ad words, search—greatest product, greatest business of all time. But they’ve got a big risk, which is that everything about Google, everything about the web right now flows through Microsoft, flows through Internet Explorer.

Ben: Yeah. Google’s entire money printing machine was built on top of Microsoft’s and at two layers. To this point, over 90% of Google search queries were done on Windows PCs, and 90% were done in Internet Explorer running on those PCs. Google’s got the killer app for the web in search. The thing under them is a browser owned by Microsoft, and the thing under that is an operating system owned by Microsoft. They exist at the pleasure of Microsoft at this point in history.

David: And Microsoft has a different business model. Google’s business model, the greatest of all time, is people use Google search, they discover more of the web, they spend more time online on these new sites and services that they’re discovering. As they’re spending more time online, they search more. Searching more leads them to discover even more new sites and services. The cycle repeats itself and Google just monetizes the whole thing.

Ben: Web usage isn’t bad for Microsoft, but if the platform of the next generation becomes the web and people are writing web applications instead of Windows applications, that makes Microsoft’s platform a lot less valuable versus other operating systems like (say) Mac or (say) a future where we change away from desktop computers altogether.

David: At a minimum, Microsoft doesn’t business model–wise care about the web because they don’t monetize the web. Microsoft makes money by OEMs selling PCs that have Windows on them. Then Microsoft sells software that goes on those PCs. At a minimum, they don’t care. At a maximum, like you’re saying, web apps are at an existential risk to Microsoft.

Ben: Oh my God. There’s a future application platform that just doesn’t really require our participation, other than the fact that we control IE. At least for now, that’s really important.

David: And most of Microsoft hasn’t realized this yet. Thank God for Google. Microsoft’s distracted with the albatross that was Longhorn that would become Windows Vista. A few people in Microsoft realize this, but Google for sure realizes this though. Eric Schmidt for double sure realizes it because he was the CEO of Novell before coming to Google. And who is Novell’s competitor? Microsoft. And Microsoft crushed them.

So, why Google’s so jazzed about Gmail? They need to build up leverage with consumers, with users, that they’re going to demand rich web applications so that if Microsoft ever tries to disadvantage Google or disadvantage web apps and things moving to the web, really the only defense against that is if consumers have already adopted this stuff and love it and would revolt. This is what Gmail is.

Gmail development’s trucking along through 2001, 2002, 2003. This is hard to remember now. It took three years to develop Gmail.

Ben: Long development cycle, yeah.

David: To be ready to release publicly. Then it was in beta for 10 years. But I think the reason it took so long was this was all new. There wasn’t a lot of depth and knowledge out there about JavaScript, certainly not about AJAX and XML dynamic refreshing.

Ben: It was really hard to program. Today you’ve got all these nice abstraction layers, these frameworks that people have built to do web development that really didn’t exist to make AJAX applications.

David: Okay, so Google’s finally getting ready to launch it; we’re in 2004. There are a couple of questions. One, the service. For all the reasons we just described, Google, Larry, Sergey, Eric, they want it to be so compelling that consumers demand it. It takes off like wildfire, it builds this strategic mode against Microsoft, but it will cost money.

Ben: There’s a reason other people don’t do this.

David: There’s a reason that a gigabyte of free storage seems a little crazy. Even if you assume, and I think this is probably directionally correct, that because of Google’s commodity infrastructure advantage, they could launch Gmail at 1/10th of the cost that anybody else could. Also, remember there’s no public cloud at this point in time.

Ben: You’d have to go build your own data center to do this.

David: You can’t just launch on AWS; there is no AWS. But even assume that Google has a 90% cost advantage on the infrastructure side, the state of the art is other competitors are offering four megabytes of free storage. Google’s going to offer a gig. Sure, knock that down by 90%, but the effective cost is still 100 megabytes.

How do you get around being flooded with cost and infrastructure demand when you launch it? They come up with the invite system. This is so brilliant. I actually don’t know if it was designed as this prestigious growth strategy thing that it became.

Ben: Anyone got any Gmail invites? Please, I’ll do anything.

David: Yeah, please, please, please. Or if it was truly because of the infrastructure cost, either way, it’s just brilliant. When they launch it on April 1st, 2004, they send out a thousand seed invites to Gmail. It’s a private invite-only internet service. They send them out to influencers. The term didn’t exist back in the day, but influential people and journalists. Then each user has a set number of invites that they can give to other users to invite their friends.

Ben: And it was low. It was like five or something. Then it wasn’t clear when they would top back up, but you’d give out your five, and then at some point you’d come in and you’d have five more, you’d have three more. It was super dynamic and very clearly whatever Google felt like they could give away from their servers at the moment.

David: But it was so brilliant. It made it feel like you’re in this special world of people in the know, that it super incentivized viral word-of-mouth growth because I’m telling you, it’s a gigabyte of free storage. It’s this incredible service. They’re selling on eBay for $150. There was a monetary value to these things.

Ben: Really?

David: Yes. They were trading on eBay for average price of $150 in the early days. So I’m giving you this gift. Incredible.

Ben: And look, everybody wants this, but you need to have the product quality that cashes the check.

David: It needs to be a real gift.

Ben: And it was. It was just better. It wasn’t just something I’d sign up for and then churn, and be like, cool, I locked in my username or whatever. It was something that you actually used every day, or in the words of Larry Page, passed the toothbrush test. It was a part of your daily habit, something you do once or twice a day.

David: I wish I could only refresh Gmail once or twice a day.

Ben: So David, was this the first software that used a wait list like this? Because obviously it’s become very popular since.

David: I think so. That’s how they take care of the cost side of the equation, is not running out of control is the invite strategy.

Ben: Well still not making any money though.

David: That’s question number two. How are we going to make money from this thing? Because yeah, okay. There are all these strategic reasons to do it. It’ll increase more traffic on the web, time spent, people will search more, we’ll make more money indirectly. But they still don’t really know that. They think, okay, we need a monetization strategy baked into the product itself. Well how do you make money from anything at Google?

Ben: This actually came up during development. Even in the prototyping phase, Paul logs into the database of ads, which is just funny that at that point in time, Google’s got this big database of ads.

David: Yeah, I’m just going to access the ads database. All of them.

Ben: These are the ads that would run when you searched and landed on a search results page. He decided to do content matching against your inbox and just show those ads on the page next to your email. Even though they weren’t meant for that, it actually turned out that these search ads were pretty relevant. It actually was a decent ad to be showing you while you’re looking at your inbox about similar topics.

So he just rolls this out. Even though all these people in Google are actually using it as their mail client at the time, people were pissed. People were like, are you looking at my emails? All the things that would then come later in the public actually happened inside Google first. But Larry and Sergey loved it. They were like, oh, this is so obviously the answer.

Ben: Interestingly, this experiment predates AdSense. Google has the display ad offering for website publishers that’s called AdSense. That’s different than AdWords, which is the keyword advertisements on a search results page. AdSense hasn’t launched yet.

There are multiple versions of history here. How much credit for AdSense does Gmail get in discovering this? But it is safe to say that the idea of display ads that are content-matched against your Gmail did contribute to the idea for the first version of AdSense, which are essentially the same thing. Content-matched ads just on a publisher website instead of the content of your inbox.

David: So the product launches publicly, April 2004. As you would expect, people go nuts. It is truly a revolutionary product. Gmail grows over the next 20 years from that thousand initial public beta user seed base to over 2 billion today. It’s still by far the best email service. Even if you use another front end for your email for your Gmail, like Superhuman or whatnot today, you still want Gmail on the backend at least as a consumer.

Once Gmail starts to take off, Larry, Sergey, and Eric see this and they’re like, wow, we should do this a lot. Let’s build as many web applications as we possibly can imagine.

Ben: What else can go into the browser that we didn’t think was possible before?

David: This fires on every single cylinder for us, most importantly, grow the web.

Ben: Grow usage.

David: You grow the web, you grow time that people spend in web browsers, they will search more, we will make more money. And beyond that, with some of these products like Gmail, we can monetize the products themselves. Great.

Two, we are building our strategic moat against Microsoft. The faster that we get the Internet-using public to fall in love with and use web applications, the less and less leverage Microsoft has over us.

Ben: To use Ben Thompson–speak, Google realizes the web can become the point of integration. Maybe the OS isn’t what the whole universe has to target—the hardware makers, the OEMs, the application makers, the users. If applications start living in the browser, then the web can become the point of integration. Users just need a browser and OEMs just need an operating system that can access the browser.

David: And what’s so great for Google because of their business model, sure. It’s great when they build, own, operate, run, and monetize web applications themselves like they do with Gmail, like they’ll do with maps, like they’ll do with Docs, like they’ll do with YouTube that we’re about to talk about. But if they don’t, it doesn’t matter. As long as anybody does it.

Ben: They just need to be wind at the back of web adoption.

David: That leads to a whole flood of Google web products and services to come. But before we tell that story…

Ben: Now is the perfect time to talk about our presenting partner, J.P. Morgan Payments. They’re investing billions every year into technology and product development. In fact, Jamie Dimon even referenced it on stage in our interview last month. This investment has led to them becoming a powerful engine for marketplaces, FinTech companies and platforms to deliver growth, stability, and scale for their customers.

David: And these days, the best companies have made payments infrastructure invisible to their users. If you’re booking a ride, buying something from a marketplace, or managing a subscription, the magic happens when payments feel seamless and integrated.

This is what J.P. Morgan Payments brings with their embedded finance solutions. Rather than bolting on payments as an afterthought, you can embed the payments infrastructure directly into your platform without customers having to leave to complete a transaction. This makes your products more seamless, and as we’ve seen from Google, the best products with the stickiest user bases are often the simplest for users.

Ben: So embedded payments are all about integrating payments directly into your platform rather than sending users to a separate payment page or third party processor. J.P. Morgan has the technology and capabilities for this with powerful APIs.

David: But behind this simplicity, there’s an incredible complexity that J.P. Morgan takes on so you don’t have to. You can get sellers up and running quickly, offering flexible payment options, provide efficient funds management, and secure money movement at scale. Plus, they have advanced analytics, marketplaces and platforms can provide payment acceptance, funds management and payouts, insecure and compliant infrastructure, all without users ever leaving their ecosystem.

Ben: And this reflects J.P. Morgan’s broader vision. They’re not just a bank anymore. They’re infrastructure with the scale resilience and security of a global leader for trust and safety. They were even recognized as the best overall embedded finance platform in Tearsheets’ Big Bank Theory Awards 2024.

David: So whether you’re building the next great marketplace or just need reliable payment infrastructure that scales with your business, no matter how large you scale, J.P. Morgan Payments is there so you can focus on what you do best. To learn more about their embedded finance solutions and how they’re powering growth for businesses small and large, head on over to jpmorgan.com/acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

Ben: All right, David, Gmail. We’ve got our existence proof of an AJAX-based web app. It’s going viral. People love it. We can really build web applications. Now, let’s go nuts.

David: The next big web apps following Gmail were Maps, Docs, and Spreadsheets, all absolutely incredible.

Ben: And it was not clear that these things were possible with web technologies.

David: These required incredible technical and product vision. First Maps. We actually did a whole Acquired episode back in the day just about Google Maps.

Ben: The three companies they acquired.

David: Yeah. It starts in 2003. Even before the Gmail launch, when a young associate product manager (APM) at Google named Bret Taylor, that Bret Taylor.

Ben: Course, of ACQ2 fame Bret Taylor.

David: Yes, recent ACQ2 guest, Bret Taylor. Oh yeah, also FriendFeed founder, Facebook CTO, co-CEO of Salesforce, chairman of OpenAI.

Ben: Former chairman of Twitter.

David: Yeah, that Bret Taylor. Starts his career out of Stanford in 2003 as an associate product manager at Google. He ends up going to Larry and is like, we’re missing out here. AOL has MapQuest, which they’ve just bought for a billion dollars. And I’m hearing through the grapevine that Yahoo is about to make a big push and launch Yahoo Maps. As you would expect, Larry’s like, oh yeah. Well, okay. Is this a web product? Yes, of course. Go do this.

Ben: For all these things that we’re studying here, there’s a business rationale, which might be extremely indirect, but it’s there. This idea of increasing web use increases Google search, which increases the money printer. But then there’s also an abstract rationale, which is our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Maps is squarely in the middle of that.

David: Now the thing was, as big as MapQuest and Yahoo Maps were about to become at the time—and they were big. I remember using them. My parents used them. Everybody on the Internet used these services—they weren’t what you think of as Google Maps today. They were static webpages, they didn’t use AJAX, and the whole point was to get driving directions.

Ben: That you could print out.

David: Exactly. The business model for these services was on the printed piece of paper that people would print out, you would put ads on there. It is like a Trojan Horse newspaper business.

Bret, Larry, and Marissa are looking at this like, I think we can do better than this. They go out and they buy a little company in Australia called Where2 Technologies, which was started by these two brothers, Lars and Jens Rasmussen, who were incredible engineers. They had built a real-time, interactive maps application, except it was an installed desktop app.

They’re meeting with them and Larry’s like, okay, this is what we want, but we need it on the web. I think actually the quote was, “We like the web at Google,” This is how good of engineers the Rasmussens were. They go off and in (I think) three weeks, they rewrite and re-architect the entire application to run as a web app. They basically independently discover and implement a lot of the JavaScript and AJAX features that Google was working on internally for Gmail. Gmail still hadn’t launched yet.

Ben: Amazing.

David: So Google ends up buying Where2 that becomes the core of Google Maps. Around the same time, they also acquired two other companies, ZipDash that did traffic data, and Keyhole which would become Google Earth. Now, Google Earth was an installed desktop application. Ultimately, everything that Google Earth was building would get folded back into Maps later.

Ben: It’s actually not true. I thought that, and just last night I realized you can still go to earth.google.com and get a completely different 3D experience than Google Maps.

David: Oh, no way.

Ben: It’s all in the web now. It’s unbelievably powerful.

David: So it is a web app, but it’s separate from Maps?

Ben: Yes.

David: I didn’t know that. I got to check that out.

Ben: It’s amazing.

David: That’s awesome. Yes, Keyhole and Google Earth (I think) is my favorite part of our first Google episode earlier this year. That the whole thing ended up just being a Trojan Horse downloader to get Google toolbar installed on Internet Explorer on people’s systems.

Ben: They’re organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful. But also it comes with Google Toolbar.

David: The greatest distribution hack for Google search of all time. Anyway, back to Google Maps and Where2. February, 2005, Google Maps launches. People go nuts. Live mapping dynamic web application.

Ben: So you want to know my favorite Easter egg for the first day launch of Google Maps? I don’t know if you know this. When you loaded up maps.google.com, do you know what visually you saw?

David: I have no recollection.

Ben: You saw a great big ocean and North America, and then floating in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, you see the UK, and then there is nothing past it.

David: They hadn’t built it yet?

Ben: They hadn’t built it yet. Europe, Asia, Africa, not included. It’s not even like it’s off limits. It looks like there’s an ocean where Europe should be.

David: How do you decide what the MVP is, the minimum viable product to ship on the map? That’s amazing. All right. There’s one more really important piece of Maps, which is the next year in 2006, they released the API. This is what really kicks off the Web 2.0 era.

Gmail, JavaScript, and AJAX had inspired developers out there for sure, to make rich web apps, and people were doing that. When Google releases the Maps API, this thing called mashups starts happening. Do you remember this?

Ben: Absolutely.

David: It’s now super easy to grab Google Maps and build stuff on top of it, and it’s really hot. This enables startups like Zillow, Uber, eventually DoorDash, Airbnb. Think about all the companies that just couldn’t exist without the Google Maps API.

Ben: There was that whole web of geo-related companies too. Remember that era of mobile, social, local, most solo.

David: Oh yeah, Foursquare and Gowalla, all those.

Ben: All this existed because Google Maps existed.

David: So back to Google’s overall strategy here and adoption of web apps and building this moat and defense against Microsoft. This is just incredible. Here’s Maps itself as a first class rich web application that tens, eventually hundreds, today billions, two billion-plus users use and love every day. Now here’s this API that’s making it really easy to help other startups and other companies go build great web apps too. The lock-in just keeps getting deeper and deeper and deeper for the web.

Ben: At first, the API was notoriously free or very inexpensive at very high limits for a long time. That’s different now, but for the longest time this is a part of the mission, so we’re doing it and we’ll figure out the business later. It’s a very founder-driven thing.

Now it’s popular to create maps. Apple at some point flipped into doing it. There are these other third-party companies, and there’s the OpenStreetMap and all this stuff. For the first five to maybe eight years, Google was the only one that had a passion for this and a willing to spend into the giant hole that you need to create maps of the whole world. It is an incredibly hard data and engineering problem.

They had to go draw all their own maps from scratch, acquire the data, figure out how to get fresh data all the time, create a crowdsourced, crazy thing among Google, Google Maps explorers or something like that. All the people that would update these things. This is an extremely Googly problem and a founder bet to be like, nope, we’re going to go spend hundreds of billions of dollars, billions of dollars on this.

Drive cars around, taking pictures of everything. Figure out how to not overshare personal information on this. Do it dynamically because you’re capturing a huge amount of… It’s just a wacky, wacky engineering problem that is daunting, and they took it on.

David: We’re not going to talk about this today, but put a pin in for the next episode, is one of the most incredibly strategically valuable data assets for the AI era, and specifically for self-driving cars.

Ben: Yes. But today, Maps has over two billion active users this year. They don’t break out revenue, but estimates are that maps does well over $5 billion in revenue, maybe even $10 billion in revenue.

The larger part of that is ads. You see recommended places to go around you all the time whenever you open Google Maps now that are sponsored ads, just like on Google search. Then the smaller part of that is from the API licensing, David, that you were talking about. But this is a real business for Google today.

David: All right. Next ones that we got to talk about, Docs and Spreadsheets. These aren’t the biggest Google apps out there today. I think if you lumped them all together into Workspace and add Drive, it is over a billion users.

Ben: That whole suite is among their most used products.

David: That whole we call it Office Suite, is that what you would call it?

Ben: That sounds like an Office-type Suite. It’s a good idea. Someone should do that.

David: So Docs and Spreadsheets hit Microsoft right where it hurts—Office. people have tried both before Google and after Google to compete with Microsoft in productivity forever.

Ben: WordPerfect. Lotus Notes, Lotus 1-2-3.

David: We talked all about that on our Microsoft episode. By the way, WordPerfect acquired and run by Novell. Who is the CEO of Novell? Eric Schmidt. Eric knows all about this.

Ben: But here’s what I will say, David. If you were starting on the foot of competing with Microsoft, or trying to build a word processor, or trying to build a spreadsheet, you would be doomed for failure. What Google was doing was saying there is something that is uniquely possible with web applications and AJAX in this Web 2.0 era for the first time. That thing is real-time collaboration.

David: Real-time multi-user collaboration. These were the first I’ve tried to wrack my brain. I talked to Sam Schillace, the founder of Writely, which Google acquired, which became Google Docs. He believes these were the first real-time multi-user collaborative pieces of software in history. It just wasn’t possible before the web.

Ben: Jonathan Rochelle, the founder of the company that would be acquired, that would become Google Spreadsheets, basically said the same thing. His comment was, we actually didn’t know if it was possible to do this in the web. Google said, based on the success we’re seeing with Gmail, I bet we could do actual spreadsheets in the browser with real-time collaboration. When the Sheets team came in, it was truly an open question of, can we make it so you and another person can party on the same very basic spreadsheet at the same time?

David: Interesting. The Docs team, so Docs was an acquisition. It was a company called Writely that was founded by Sam and his two co-founders who were great programmers. They’ve worked together for many years.

Ben: I used Writely before it became a Google product.

David: No way. You were one of very few people who did that, because it was not an independent company for long. Product launched August, 2005. Google bought the company in March, 2006. You had about a six-month window. They built real-time collaborative word processing as a web app inspired by Gmail and everything that was going on at Google.

The whole company started as, oh, for our next project, let’s explore what we can do with JavaScript and AJAX. Oh, what would it be like if we put a word processor on the web? They weren’t actually even thinking about collaboration at first, but then as they were working on it together, they naturally started collaborating about, oh, this is the killer feature.

Ben: That’s funny. That’s different from the Spreadsheets team. Their whole thing at first was we’re not going to make a better spreadsheet than Excel. If we put it in the web, it has to be about sharing/collaboration.

David: And to your earlier point, nobody can compete with Microsoft and productivity software. One, because they’d been doing it so long, they had this feature wall of so many features that people needed.

Ben: Two, proprietary file formats.

David: They had a network effect of the file format.

Ben: You built your big model in Excel. Good luck.

David: Other people need to be able to run it on their installed desktop applications. Good luck getting somebody to try downloading or buying a new piece of software and installing it on their machine. But three, the biggest by far, the enterprise agreement. This is Microsoft’s whole entire business model.

Ben: You don’t have to be best in breed in any specific thing. You just have to be a platform with everything.

David: Yup. IT departments will buy it. Especially for productivity software, really all the money is in B2B and work applications. If IT departments are buying the Microsoft Enterprise agreement, they’re getting everything. Good luck unseating Microsoft Office.

Ben: I’m not sure you could do this as an independent business, because think about how long Google went with these things before they were adopted by bigger companies. For the longest time it was, oh, a Google Doc. Either you use that for your personal life or maybe a startup would use it, but even a medium-sized company, you can’t be serious. Get out of here with that. Google was basically able to subsidize it because they had a giant existing business.

David: You are so right. Nobody except Google could do this for a whole bunch of reasons. One, you talk about subsidizing. Imagine trying to build this software as an independent company, or really even as any other company. It would require a lot of infrastructure, real-time, multi-user collaboration in a web app. Gosh, that seems like really complicated server and backend infrastructure for Google.

Ben: It’s what they do.

David: Running Docs and Sheets, the incremental load to Google’s infrastructure was trivial compared to Search. They already had it built out. It was super cheap.

Two, they don’t need to make money from it. This is the big reason why nobody else could compete. Microsoft has all the dollars completely on lockdown because of the enterprise agreement.

Ben: Big dollars. These small and medium businesses would of course pay for something, but those dollars don’t add up to be nearly as big.

David: Exactly. Google, though, that’s fine. Microsoft can keep all the dollars. All we care about is people use the web. In this instance, particularly with Office and productivity, really this is about putting the screws to Microsoft a little bit and distracting them.

From Google’s point of view, this is a cheap distraction. If this gets Microsoft all spun up, Microsoft is now all of a sudden getting asked all the time, what’s your web strategy for office? When are you going to add collaboration to Word and Excel, et cetera, et cetera? They don’t have any answers.

Ben: I literally worked on this. My internship was at Microsoft and I worked on adding headers and footers to the Microsoft Word web app. We were porting the Windows code to have perfect document fidelity to the web, so when you looked on the web and then print it from the web, the document would be laid out, pixel for pixel, character for character, exactly how it would look on the printed page. When you have that requirement, that is a hard, hard engineering task. It’s still not as good as Google Docs.

David: I love it that this launched your technology career. Amazing. But yeah, from Google’s perspective, this is amazing. Microsoft is now forced to bring their crown jewels to the web, which they don’t want to do. Ben, to your point, because they have to make it look and feel and function exactly like the installed desktop apps, this is going to take them a long time and be a big investment. Fantastic.

Ben: And no matter what, it’s going to be more complicated because with Google, since it’s all free, there’s no licensing. Someone just shares a Google Doc with you. If you have permission to view it, you view it.

With Microsoft, I remember at first it was antithetical. It was like, but what if I haven’t bought Word? Can I just use Word for free in the web then? Is Microsoft okay with that? Am I going to hit some weird usage tier? It’s confusing for users. It forces the company to think about pricing and packaging. It was a master stroke by Google.

David: Fast forward to today, it’s hard to get real actual apples-to-apples data on Google Workspace versus Microsoft Office users. But basically, the way to think about the market is that Google has the vast majority of users and usage of productivity software, and Microsoft still has the vast majority of dollars. And that’s fine. Google’s super happy about that.

Ben: Is that true that there are more active users of Google Workspace than there is of Office?

David: Yeah. I think if you look at users of Docs, Sheets, or Slides, it’s in the billion-ish, 500 million billion range for each of those. Office (I think) has a couple of hundred million users worldwide.

Ben: That’s crazy. I didn’t realize that.

David: Pretty wild. But to my point about the dollars, so Microsoft’s productivity and business process segment, which is mostly Office—I think LinkedIn is now part of this too—last year generated over $120 billion in revenue. Google reports Workspace as part of the cloud segment, so all of cloud, inclusive of their Infrastructure as a Service, all the AI infrastructure, all that, the whole cloud segment for Google last year did about $50 billion in revenue, less than $50 billion. Microsoft’s productivity segment, $120 billion. Office is the big piece.

Ben: And that’s high margin revenue.

David: High margin revenue. Google’s office products are some small portion of a $50 billion revenue segment. So yeah, Microsoft’s still got all the money, Google’s got all the users, and everybody’s happy.

Ben: You’re so right. Everyone is happy. That’s exactly what Google wants.

David: Ultimately today, Microsoft is fine with this arrangement too. The ultimate fun coda though is Sam Schillace, founder of Writely, he would go on to manage all of Docs and Sheets. I think he actually managed Maps at some point too. He is now the deputy CTO of Microsoft.

Ben: Careers are long.

David: Amazing.

Ben: The interesting thing, reflecting on Google’s actual business here and comparing it against all the things that we’re talking about, Google essentially won search by the mid- late-2000s. I know Bing hasn’t even launched yet, and we’ll get to that, but Search was going to continue becoming a more and more giant market.

All this stuff they’re doing, it’s like, oh, we’ve won and this market is naturally going to become large. I guess let’s just fuel it getting larger and try to do a bunch of stuff under the umbrella of our mission. But what do we really need to do?

The slightly more altruistic answer, I suspect if Larry Page was sitting next to us, he would say, what is the goal of a company? The goal of a company isn’t build the largest business necessarily. It’s to fulfill its mission. Yeah, we got a money printing machine from Search, and we’re investing a lot of money still in Search and making that better, but all these things fulfill our mission too.

David: I think these things are all true.

So on the back of the success of Maps, Docs, Spreadsheets, really starts to inform Google’s strategy here. Specifically they’ve seen, hey, we can acquire these web app, Web 2.0 companies, bring them into Google, turbocharge them, offer these magical experiences to consumers. We get all this strategic value out of them, both on the offensive and defensive front. We can operate these things at a fraction of the expense that it would cost anyone else to do so, standalone company or part of other big companies.

Ben: And some of the things we could buy actually fit into our core ads business quite well.

David: Yeah. What if we went big with this, like really big?

Ben: Like something super expensive to run, that requires storage of massive videos, and bandwidth for streaming these massive videos, and lawsuit protection.

David: Probably also costs a lot to buy it because it’s well-funded from Sequoia. That leads us to YouTube.

Ben: But before we do that, now is a great time to thank friend of the show, Anthropic and their AI assistant, Claude.

David: As we were researching Google’s expansion here from just Search into being a real platform company here in the 2000s with Gmail and Chrome, Android, Workspace, everything we’re going to get to later in the episode, the complexity just skyrocketed with all these interconnected systems that needed to scale to billions of users and keep information flowing between all the various products and services that Google was launching.

The funny thing is how quaint that problem seems today compared to the scale, speed, and interconnectedness that you need in the AI era. If you’re an enterprise building today in AI, you need to deal with all of this times 10.

Ben: Enter Claude. What makes Claude different for the enterprise is sustained performance on complex tasks. We’re talking about the work that would typically take your senior engineers weeks, like refactoring entire code bases or synthesizing thousands of regulatory documents. I wouldn’t know anything about that.

Claude can handle these multi-hour projects while maintaining context and fewer hallucinations throughout. Claude is actually the most adopted AI within enterprises when it comes to their API.

David: That’s because Claude integrates seamlessly with existing workflows through their MCP connector system. They have prebuilt integrations with tools like Jira, GitHub, HubSpot, and Square, plus custom integrations for any internal system making Claude your central knowledge resource.

Ben: So companies like GitLab are already using Claude for coding, and research teams use it to process documents that would normally take weeks to analyze manually.

David: If you’re building the next generation of intelligent applications, check out Anthropic’s enterprise offerings to see how teams are transforming their workflows with Claude.

Ben: And we’ve got a special offer for Acquired listeners to try out Claude before making the enterprise commitment. Half-price Claude Pro for three months. Go to claude.ai/acquired to get started.

David: And just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

Ben: All right, David, the YouTube story.

David: The big kahuna.

Ben: The big kahuna.

David: The most embarrassing thing in Acquired history was our early episode on YouTube.

Ben: All right. I have got a proposal for you.

David: Okay, I’m ready for it. You want to take it out of the feed? Delete it?

Ben: Today we’re setting the record straight. When we finish this section, we are regrading YouTube. We are updating the Acquired cannon. It’s happening.

David: Oh, let’s do it. We’re bringing grading back, baby.

Ben: Great. I’m glad you’re into it.

David: I love it.

Ben: Awesome.

David: All right. YouTube, 2003. Same timeframe as everything we’re talking about here. Gmail hasn’t even launched yet. Google starts working on Google video. The idea is that there’s a lot of information in video. and thus it fits Google’s mission, Ben, as you were saying earlier.

Also, well, there are just so much more advertising dollars in TV than anywhere else in the global economy.

Ben: To this point in time, TV was the bulk of ad spend.

David: If you go look at some of the old Mary Meeker internet trends decks, remember from this time period, and you look at the share of global ad dollars spent on TV versus any other category, it’s just so much bigger than anything else.

Ben: David, I am so glad you did this. We are brothers. I did the exact same thing to try to tee this up.

David: Amazing.

Ben: I have the stats in front of me. For listeners, digital advertising. Google’s universe, would not eclipse TV until 2017–2018.

David: Wow. So almost 15 years in the future from when we’re talking about here in 2003.

Ben: Yes. That is the wildest thing that TV was bigger than digital for that long. Mary Meeker famously had this point that she made every single year that the attention was all in the digital economy, but there was this gap, and the ad monetization hadn’t caught up yet. It took all the way till 2018 for the flip to finally happen where digital overtook television.

David: Thanks to YouTube and Facebook and Meta and TikTok, et cetera.

Ben: And the rest of Google too.

David: I know. This Google video project actually came out of the ads org. It didn’t come out of engineering and the rest of the Google product org.

Ben: Oh, really?

David: Yeah. It was motivated by, hey, there’s a lot of money in TV. Of course, this fits the mission. There’s a lot of information in video. We should totally do this.

Ben: Here’s how Lowry describes it. Google video was first launched in 2005 as a search service for television content, because TV closed captioning made search possible and user-generated video had yet to take off. But it subsequently evolved into a site where individuals and corporations alike could post their own videos.

They were digitizing TV because the transcription wasn’t as good as it is today, so they needed the closed captioning data to make it searchable. They were almost like meta searching. They were looking for other websites that allowed people to upload video and including that in the search results also.

David: Sure, you can see how this conceivably could be a product vision you could have at the time. But Google video was the wrong product. The problem was, one, you couldn’t actually watch the video. It was just search that then directed you, just like Google’s main search business model, off of Google video to then go consume it somewhere else. In the beginning it didn’t even have a player.

Ben: Whoa, I didn’t realize that.

David: Crazy. Well, that’s a pretty big problem. Another big problem, shall we say, was that the focus was on traditionally-produced head content. Not long tail, not user-generated content.

Ben: It was really tied to TV. There was a press release that said that they could search the content of TV programs, find programs containing the content they’re looking for, and discover when and where the program will next air.

David: Meanwhile, obviously here we are in 2004, 2005, 2006. Consumer-generated digital video is becoming a thing, either via standalone new devices, like the Flip cam that’s coming out from, Flip was a startup, right? And then Cisco bought it?

Ben: Yeah. My other internship employer bought Flip while I was there.

David: This is Ben Gilbert personal history. But more commonly, there were dedicated devices like the Flip cam, but digital point-and-shoot cameras had gotten so good by this point in time. This is going to come back up later in the episode.

People thought this was the big consumer electronic device vector before smartphones. People were really, really excited about how good and how universally-adopted digital cameras were. All of a sudden in the mid-2000s for the first time, anybody could make a video at any time.

Ben: And iMovie was just becoming a thing. You could shoot it on your point-and-shoot and you can edit on your computer.

David: That’s right. So YouTube. In early 2005, three PayPal employees, from the PayPal Mafia, actually fairly junior employees at PayPal—Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen—leave PayPal and create YouTube.

Okay, Ben, I have two deep-cut YouTube corporate history trivia items for you. Number one, do you know what YouTube’s original tagline was? The name of the company was YouTube. What was the tagline and the value prop?

Ben: I have no idea.

David: Tune in, Hook up.

Ben: Really?

David: It was a video dating service.

Ben: I didn’t know that.

David: They actually posted Craigslist ads in the Bay Area for attractive women to make videos to post as profiles on the site.

Ben: Unbelievable.

David: And they got no responses as you would expect. Thank goodness for them in Google though, because then they pivoted into a general-purpose video uploading site that anybody could upload anything that they made YouTube.

Okay, so that’s trivia question number one. Trivia question number two. Do you know who Chad Hurley’s—Chad was the CEO—father-in-law at the time was?

Ben: Oh no, I have no idea.

David: Jim Clark.

Ben: Of SGI and Netscape?

David: Of Silicon Graphics and Netscape. Jim Clark. That Jim Clark.

Ben: Wow. Didn’t know that.

David: Not only were they part of the PayPal team and PayPal Mafia, they had the best advisor of all time to navigate the Silicon Valley ecosystem and the Internet ecosystem in Jim Clark.

The brilliance of YouTube and it really was absolutely brilliant, was threefold. One, it was super easy for anyone to upload a video. They had a killer content acquisition model. Anybody, anytime, anything.

Ben: And as soon as the servers process it, we’ll put it live. No copyright checks. Unlike Google video, which would take one to two days.

David: It’s all about copyright checks.

Ben: For humans to pour over it, make sure that it was all good, and bless it, and then put it live, which of course won’t scale in the UGC era. YouTube’s just like, whatever. Upload it.

David: Two, super easy for anyone to watch a video. You need a really good viewer in the web app to view the videos. Google Video didn’t have it at the beginning. So killer content consumption model. Go to youtube.com, find something or find a link.

Or number three, brilliant thing about YouTube, see a YouTube video embedded on another website. Boom, you’re watching the video. Killer growth and distribution model.

Also, YouTube pretty much from the beginning had great search. You can search YouTube and find videos that you’re looking for pretty quickly. YouTube became and still is—Google talks about this all the time—the second largest search engine on Earth behind Google.

Ben: It’s amazing.

David: Its searches’ happening on YouTube.

Ben: That happened quickly. I always thought that was a more recent, last 10 years’ phenomenon.

David: I think that happened very quickly. YouTube traffic scaled so fast and so big. You can see how YouTube here, not only are they the correct video platform for the web and just doing it much better than Google’s doing it with Google video. There’s actually some version of the world where they might become a real competitor to Google’s core business. If all these searches are happening. They could add search for other things on YouTube too.

Ben: I don’t think they had any plans to do that, but it’s the same rationale of Mark Zuckerberg saying uh-oh, everyone’s using WhatsApp for messaging. Whether or not they put in a social media feed stream, they always could. So it’s really dangerous to me for them to be out there aggregating all the users and attention and habits when they always could do something like that.

David: Exactly. Same dynamic. Whereas in the previous categories of apps that we talked about, Google had the advantage of uniquely being able to do it as Google in a way that startups couldn’t. Here, it’s a little bit the opposite. YouTube as a small startup has the advantage of, oh, copyright, rules, laws. I don’t know. We’re just a platform. We’re just a startup. Anybody upload anything. Google, by this point in time is a public company. No way they could behave like this.

Ben: Well, it’s funny. They could but they wouldn’t. They actually could do it and stay in business. Whereas YouTube can say, eh, whatever, but then they’re going to go out of business because they’re going to get sued out of business. It’s this really interesting catch-22 of this is the way to start and get all the users because this is the best user experience. At the same time, it will not work as a resource-constrained small company.

David: Once it is started, it needs to be part of Google. Obviously we’re going to get to that. But in the beginning, though, oh my gosh. the embeds were a beautiful distribution growth mechanic for YouTube, but people were just uploading copyrighted video that people could watch for free.

It’s almost like Gmail. It is so unbelievably compelling to a consumer. When your friend tells you about YouTube or just sends you a link or you see an embed page of, whoa, I can go watch Lazy Sunday from Lonely Island and Saturday Night Live in my web browser anytime I want for free with no commercials? Yes, I want that.

In fact, when users started uploading Lazy Sunday, the Lonely Islands skit from Saturday Night Live to YouTube—this is in that brief phase where YouTube was an ascendant startup and not yet part of Google—that one skit increased YouTube traffic by 83%. Unbelievable.

Ben: So they very quickly raised money from Sequoia, is that right?

David: Yup. It was basically incubated at Sequoia. When the three founders left PayPal, Sequoia invested right away. I think it was Rulof Botha’s first investment when he joined.

Ben: Because Rulof knew them from PayPal. He’s also part of the PayPal Mafia.

David: Exactly. And then Sequoia led another round pretty quickly thereafter because the infrastructure costs started as you would imagine scaling astronomically here.

Ben: So three things that are very expensive, two of which are ongoing. One is a one-time cost. The one-time cost, but still expensive is encoding the video. This might eventually play on multiple types of devices and multiple browsers, so there’s a lot of encoding that has to happen.

Two then are just big ongoing variable costs. You have to store all this video and the biggest of all the networking, the bandwidth becomes extremely expensive and costs you every single time someone plays the video. Your biggest cost driver scales with minutes watched. That is eventually going to kill you unless you have an aligned business model.

David: By the way, it would also be really nice if whoever owns and operates this had its own really good, really cheap infrastructure where all of these things built into it.

So yeah, pretty quickly within a little over a year of launching, YouTube is in way over its head. The content issues, the copyright issues, the infrastructure scaling issues.

Ben: It’s all exactly what they wanted. It’s going as well as they could have hoped. And it isn’t way over its head.

David: If this had happened today, you could probably raise enough capital from the private markets to address this and scale up as a company fast enough, especially with public cloud that you could probably build this as a standalone company.

Ben: Today you can go raise billions of dollars as a Series A startup, if you’re in the right space doing the most interesting things with the big market.

David: 2005–2006, not the same private capital available. Of course there’s no way the company could go public with all these issues or anything.

Ben: In particular, there was a giant suit from Viacom.

David: Because of these things, YouTube ends up basically putting itself up for sale. They have no leverage in content negotiations, with rights holders, and infrastructure is killing them. So in November 2006, which is less than 18 months after the product launched, Google buys YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.

Ben: In stock. I’m glad you caught that too.

David: All Google stock. We heard in the research that after this deal, Patrick Pichette (I think) was the CFO of Google at the time.

Ben: He said never again. This was our biggest mistake.

David: Said never again. This is the last stock deal that we ever do.

Ben: Google’s market cap has 20x’d since the day that this deal closed. If they had paid in cash, they would’ve made an extra 20 times multiple on whatever you already think the multiple is on their purchase of YouTube.

David: The thing is though—we will correct the Acquired record at the end of this section—either way, even if Google paid 20 times $1.6 billion for this, they got a screaming deal. YouTube is so valuable.

Ben: I have some of the numbers from the first few years that I was able to cobble together. Then I want to talk about some of the product evolution over the years.

David: Great.

Ben: Google buys it for $1.65 billion. Interestingly, Shishir Mehrotra this week went on the Grit podcast, the Kleiner Perkins podcast, and laid out a bunch of data on this. I actually didn’t have a chance to reach out to Shishir yet because it just came out. But a lot of this is from that conversation.

After the acquisition, he said, and Shishir was the head of product and basically the CPO/CTO at YouTube, not right after the acquisition, but within a year came in for four or five years. After the acquisition, he said it was doing about $30 million in revenue.

So they did have revenue. I believe, just to foreshadow our next chapter, that was in the form of programmatic advertising that was on the Doubleclick ad exchange that they were using to make money. They were losing about a billion dollars a year run rate on $30 million in revenue. The amount of money they lost was almost exactly equal to a penny per view.

Just imagine every time you loaded YouTube in those years, Google would just flush a penny down the drain. They got to figure out something to do about this. For the first couple of years, the CFO at the time was terrified of it scaling. like please don’t scale in its current state. But of course there’s nothing they can do. The cat’s out of the bag, it’s scaling. The CFO was exploring, hey, can we sell this to one of the other companies who was bidding on it?

David: That’s right because Yahoo and the media companies also wanted to buy YouTube.

Ben: Shishir says, we were broadly known as Google’s first mistake.

David: Well, back to my tee-up in the intro being a pure play, investors didn’t like this. For a long time, this was a huge knock. Geez, when we did our episode 10 years ago about YouTube, we said it was a terrible acquisition.

Ben: The thing we haven’t talked about, music licensing was really expensive. They were one of the top revenue sources for the music industry for a long time. Maybe even still one of the top few to the music industry.

David: Right up there with Spotify.

Ben: On the product side of things, early on, as you were saying, the way that you found YouTube is you would see it embedded on a different site. You would click through and then you may stick around to watch something after. But then you’d leave and your entry point to YouTube again was another embed.

Most sessions did not start on youtube.com, so you weren’t going to YouTube with the idea of they’ll recommend something to me. Then even the people who did go to youtube.com in this 4–5 year period after the acquisition, 90% of that traffic was there to search. They just ignored anything that you recommended to them. It takes a long time (a) to build habits, and (b) to build out the technology to make any recommendation or browse or anything good.

David: For first with related videos and then ultimately the feed. Just for a sense of scale, there was a report that estimated that YouTube that year in 2007 consumed as much bandwidth as the entire internet did in the year 2000, so just seven years before.

Ben: I have an extremely similar stat from Shishir, which is to later period. It’s 2014, but it’s apples-to-apples, rather than comparing that 2007 to 2000. He said in 2014, YouTube was 20% of the bits on the Internet.

David: Wow.

Ben: This stat, but especially your stat illustrates just how much this thing took off, and also just how much more bandwidth video took up than any other media type on the Internet.

David: But the long-term play here obviously is the Mary Meeker slide of, the reason that video gets consumed so much is this is what humans want, and you can advertise against it.

Ben: And Google realized this. I think they were very smart to, rather than trying to continue investing in Google video to basically say they got the lightning in the bottle, they have the consumer brand, they have the attention. Let’s just go buy that thing, on a expected value basis, if you’re making a bet, sure you could build it on your own cheaper, but your chance of succeeding is so unlikely relative to buying that thing that it’s actually a deal to get it for 1.65 billion plus the billion that we’ll need to invest every year for a few years to run it in the red. 2009 is the year where the business really starts working. Google actually discloses nothing about profitability, but that the ad revenue tripled in one year. In 2009, 2010, 2011, they turned profitable. There was a report that in 2012 they were estimated to make about $4 billion in revenue, but roughly break even than the 2012, 13, 14. I think they were small, profitable, but profitable. Then in 2013 to 2015, that time period on the product side, that’s when things really changed. The North Star really became, users should go to YouTube to be entertained for 15 minutes. It's our job to do whatever we need to do to make that true. A few things really helped with this, one was the shift to mobile. In mobile, remember they were a launch partner on the iPhone.

David: We’re going to get into it.

Ben: There were a lot more low intent sessions. people who opened the app, rather than clicking through from an embed page.

David: Low intent being, low intent of watching a specific thing.

Ben: Yes. It’s a beautiful thing on mobile that you can say, I’ve got something to recommend to you. obviously short form, vertical video like TikTok and YouTube shorts and all that these days, is that on steroids, mobile also made it the case that any given user was more likely to be logged in that way. All the personalization, all the algorithm stuff works well. They also adjusted their core metric internally away from views and to watch time. YouTube was very early to the concept of creator monetization. For a long time, it was the only place on the Internet where creators could make money.

David: Share revenue with creators.

Ben: In our old episode we knocked them. We said, look, this business has to give its first 50% off the top of any revenue it makes to the creator of the video. It’s a way worse business than say, Google search ads or Facebook who Facebook has influencers on their platforms too. All the meta platforms, Instagram and their rev share, if it’s anything sure isn’t 50%, it’s probably closer to zero. YouTube, right early on said, you’re a 50 ish percent partner, which takes you a decade longer to get profitable, but helps you build that base.

David: It just creates amazing incentives for people to build businesses and careers on this. YouTube is the ultimate instantiation of the Internet to me. The power that it can provide to individuals to make a living. It abstracts the need at all to create or run a business. It really just simplifies it down to make content that people watch. You will get money for it. You don’t have to do anything else in between.

Ben: There’s a little slide of hand that you did there, David, which is that people watch.

David: Well, yes.

Ben: YouTube internally went back and forth for years on this. I think we’re in this no man’s land that we’ve landed today. Camp one is, hey, the way to make people most engaged is by getting them to follow creators and they curate the information sources they want. Camp two is in algorithms we trust. It turns out camp two is actually correct, which is unfortunate. It’s a messed up incentive. Most of the time if you show someone something that they’re subscribed to or you show someone something that the very smart computers have figured out, you will watch and then watch another video after that. Usually the algorithmic approach is right. There is this internal conflict there where they say, yeah, of course you should subscribe, but your views are only loosely related to how many subscribers you have.

David: Yep. This is the dark side to the YouTube economy.

Ben: Yes.

David: But putting that aside, just this sheer concept of anybody and everybody in the world has a video camera today can create something and if it’s good and people watch it and the definition of good being, the algorithm likes it, you will make money. With no other steps in between. That can only happen on the Internet.

Ben: It’s pretty interesting because it has these two business models in core Google Land. They have the AdWords business model where they’re the first party media site, each search result page as a form of media and they run ads on that and then they keep approximately 100% of the revenue generated from that ad. The advertiser pays them and they share some in the form of traffic acquisition costs that we’ll talk about later. But it’s a largely a first party ad. Then they have this other form AdSense and the Google content network when they show display ads on other people’s websites where they share like 70% of the revenue or most of the revenue out to the publisher.

David: Publisher, the content owner.

Ben: Who actually is the reason why there’s an ad there in the first place. YouTube was a interesting mix between the two. They were comfortable and familiar with the idea that we can manage a platform where we actually share a lot of the revenue with those producing the content, which is interesting. Like if they had never gone into the AdSense world and they were purely a search engine, I think it would’ve probably been more of a fight to try to do this 50% split with creators. All right,  there’s a thing that I mentioned earlier. This notion of people on mobile are more likely to be logged in than people who just hit a webpage on desktop. Logged inness is essential for YouTube’s success. That is actually new to Google. Logged inness is not essential to the effectiveness of a search engine or even the monetization of a search engine. We’ve flirted with this idea, you can hear it through our episode of things like Gmail are good because then you’re logged into Google but there’s not a giant lift.

David: It’s like a nice to have.

Ben: Yes. Search, especially on the advertising side is already so bottom of funnel,

David: Right? The intent is right there. I don’t need to know what your demographics are, I know what your intent is.

Ben: You search for a shovel, I’m going to sell you a shovel.

David: Yeah.

Ben: That’s a stark contrast to YouTube where the whole YouTube flywheel really only works with logged in users.

David: Not just for serving videos and content for you to watch, but also for advertising. This is how the television advertising ecosystem works. It’s about targeting, why does Chevrolet advertise on football games? You need demographic data.

Ben: Right. All right, so David, are you ready to regrade the acquisition of YouTube by Google?

David: Yes. We got to set the context of how big it is today.

Ben: Alright, back in 2016 we had two knocks on YouTube. One is that it wasn’t a destination site. Narrative number two was they only get to keep 50% of their total gross revenue and then they’ve got these crazy infrastructure costs and they’ll never be able to outrun them. Well they sure have solved both of these issues. Clearly a destination site, actually more than anything, a destination app, you open YouTube and an algorithm we trust.

David: It’s what I do every night before I go to bed.

Ben: Yes, it’s some mix of things you’re subscribed to and things you’re not, but things YouTube believes will grip your attention at that moment on the infrastructure costs. Let’s just start by unpacking their financials. Last year in 2024, YouTube ads alone did $36 billion in revenue, half goes to creators, they have 18 billion left to play with and they’ve had two decades to figure out how to get their variable costs down for video hosting, bandwidth compute for encoding, music, licensing, all that stuff. They now do insane feats of engineering, including doing their own custom silicon to do video encoding. They also have a whole bunch of crazy things that they do like change the video encoding that is used depending on how many views the episode has.

David: Interesting.

Ben: They do like vanilla H264 when you first upload it and then when it hits some number of views it switches to a more computationally expensive to encode, but then smaller to distribute format. then when you hit another one, when you have like 5 million views or something, then they do it yet again. They re-encode the video and make the file size even smaller. They've figured out all these little optimizations to make any given stream as inexpensive as possible on the variable cost basis.

David: Brilliant.

Ben: On the revenue side, they have gotten much better at selling ads and most estimates is that YouTube is actually quite profitable now on top of the 36 billion in advertising revenue, Google reported that if you include subscription revenue, so this is things like YouTube premium, YouTube music, NFL Sunday ticket, they’re now doing over 50 billion in revenue.

David: Wow.

Ben: David, this now makes YouTube the second largest media company by revenue after only Disney.

David: And Disney has so many other things contributing to that revenue theme, parks, cruise ships, merchandise, et cetera.

Ben: Yes. YouTube is already bigger than Disney’s media business and this year will likely become bigger than Disney’s entire business.

David: The question is how does that revenue figure compare to Netflix?

Ben: I’m glad you asked. Netflix annual revenue for 2024 was 39 billion. They’ve already eclipsed Netflix.

David: Wow. there you go. Google doesn’t release usage data for YouTube, but I’m pretty sure that YouTube is the biggest single property on the Internet in terms of minutes spent by humans on it. It’s not, I believe that the biggest number of users on the Internet, both Facebook Blue App and WhatsApp are bigger in terms of total number of users. But I think YouTube probably dwarfs them in terms of time spent by users on the app. I think it is the biggest,

Ben: I could see that.

David: Human attention, time sink known to man.

Ben: Then the question becomes how profitable is the 50 billion in revenue? And officially we don’t know, but there are these great things called research firms out there that make our jobs that Acquired here much easier. Storied firm, Moffett Nathanson published a report earlier this year that they think YouTube does about $8 billion in operating income, 8 billion a year. I’d want to diff that against their total investment into.

David: Oh yeah. Okay, great. This is the way to grade it. Okay, here we go.

Ben: Yes. Now we are getting into grading here. We’re landing the YouTube plane,

David: The definitive Acquired regrading of YouTube.

Ben: As mentioned earlier, I don’t think they ever lost much more than a billion a year, and I think they got break even within conservatively five years. After the $1.7 billion purchase price and the $5 billion in additional costs, Google paid $6.7 billion. I bet it’s closer to five and a half, six to own something that spits off $8 billion a year in profit today. Revenues are growing 10% to 15% every year.

David: By the way, also since I think the theme of this whole episode is like the dual bottom line to Google of everything they’re doing of both revenue and profits and strategic installation versus other large tech companies.

Ben: Oh, but David, you’re forgetting the third of organizing the world’s information and making it.

David: Okay. The triple bottom line, there we go. The triple bottom line. Google itself, not including YouTube, pretty much whiffed on social, really, really strategically good for them that they own YouTube, isn’t it? Now that meta and TikTok exist.

Ben: Here’s the crazy thing. They whiffed on social and then what ended up happening

David: Was social became YouTube.

Ben: Yes, it’s the craziest thing. We don’t open apps anymore to look at what our friends are posting. A place where Google has no presence, but you open Meta’s most important property with Instagram and you look at Instagram’s most used thing reels, or you look at TikTok and what do you see? You see videos from people you don’t know. It's crazy that the rest of social media or almost like user generated media pivoted into Google space.

David: This was the big Dan Mon to our meta episode last fall was, hey, social networking, such as the conception of it existed in the mid two thousands and 2010s is dead. It’s gone. It bifurcated into private messaging and public media.

Ben: Yes. The middle ground of, wide group of people you know is effectively dead. It’s close friends and it’s, I don’t really care where it came from, but it’s entertaining.

David : Yep.

Ben: You could do a discounted cash flow on this thing that I just gave you this call it 6 billion of investment and now 8 billion growing at 10 to 15% every year. But there’s additional strategic value too, in addition to this thing you just said, this becoming the winner in the short form era, they have the largest corporates of video to train on for the AI era.

David: Let’s go.

Ben: Moffett Nathanson estimated that if this was publicly traded, it would be worth about $500 billion as a standalone company. Even conservatively, if you take media company comps and do a revenue multiple and you discount all the strategic future value, it’s still like $200 billion. This is officially one of the best acquisitions of all time. I am raising my grade from a C to an A plus.

David: I am obviously right there with you. This is an A plus, plus, plus.

Ben: Now it’s not really fair to say that it’s like turning 6 billion into 500. That initial 1.7 was largely Google stock that they traded. That had real opportunity cost, but it’s still ridiculous.

David: Like I said earlier, a screaming deal either way.

Ben: Yes.

David: All right. There we go. We have revised history. Corrected the record.

Ben: Yes. All right, well for our next chapter, I motion that we go back closer to Google’s core business of advertising on the web.

David: Maybe also, stay closer to Acquired its original raison d'etre of discussing the greatest acquisitions of all time.

Ben: We may as well follow up YouTube with double click, but before we do that, it is time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig. On our first Google episode earlier this year, we talked about how great the search business model is and how once a company takes a lead, it’s just hard for anybody else to catch up. But Google did something that kept them in the lead using data to relentlessly improve the search experience.

David: Yep. Google really was a pioneer in the idea of a data-driven product culture. They took this to the extreme with a famous example where they tested 50 different shades of blue for their links on Google search result pages to find the optimal one. They also famously leveraged user data when people correct their queries to Bootstrap, did you mean Autocorrect feature? More recently, they even opted people into AI search via an AB test.

Ben: This obsession with testing helped Google find a thousand small product and business wins. It also helped Google scale its unique culture where its employees can quickly test and ship new products and features because they all have access to great tools.

David: But for a long time, smaller companies didn’t have access to the same quality of tools that were available at places like Google. Now that’s changed thanks to Statsig.

Ben: The smartest new companies like OpenAI, Figma, Atlassian, Brex Notion, and anthropic plus hundreds of startups that you see and use every day are using Statsig to build a bottoms up data-driven product culture. Statsig provides all the tools you need to make data-driven product decisions in one place. Advanced experimentation, feature flags, product analytics, session replays and more, all backed by a single set of product data.

David: And using Statsig isn’t just about saving engineering time, it’s about bringing that Google level continuous improvement culture into your company. Rather than arguing about metric definitions or troubleshooting broken tools, your team can focus on shipping improvements.

Ben: If you already have your own product data, Statsig is warehouse native. They can plug directly into your existing data in Snowflake or BigQuery, whatever.

David: If you’re interested in giving your product team the same continuous improvement capabilities that keep Google search ahead, go to statsig.com/acquired. That’s statsig.com/acquired. They’ve got a generous free tier of $50,000 startup program and affordable enterprise plans. Just tell them that Ben and David sent you DoubleClick . Well, if buying YouTube in October, 2006 for $1.65 billion was a lot, Google decided to basically double that a few months later in April of 2007 when they bought double click for $3.1 billion in cash. This time not stock.

Ben: And this is on the display ads side of the house. Google’s got two advertising businesses at this point. There’s AdWords when you search and you get the blue links that show up above the blue links. Then there’s the off property or the Google Network ads at this point in time, Google just is operating something called AdSense, which is this ad network that they’ve started. DoubleClick actually has a fascinating company history before Google that I did not know.

David: Not a hot rising startup like YouTube that they bought for a couple of billion dollars

Ben: Though it once was.

David: Yes.

Ben: Here’s the DoubleClick  story and huge thank you. There’s a new book that actually just came out by Ari Paparo, the book is called Yield.  DoubleClick was originally founded in 1995.

David: So before Google,

Ben: Before Google, the founders were Kevin O’Connor and Dwight Merriman and their headquarters were in New York City. The original idea was twofold. One build software that could let advertisers serve ads across websites. This is called an ad server. The network of websites and media, the advertisements, when people talk about paid media, it’s the advertisements themselves that would run over the next five years. They end up building and acquiring their way to being the leading display ad network and ad server.

David: And they went public during this time.

Ben: Yep, 1998, shining success of the .com industry. However, .com crash happens, 70% of double clicks customers not only churn, but go out of business. A huge amount of DoubleClick’s advertisers were actually VC-backed startups. Brand dollars hadn’t really spread to the web yet. We talked about the digital advertising was so early and so nascent.

David: It was pets.com that was advertising on other .com properties.

Ben: Exactly. They're almost levered on the bubble is probably the right way to think about it. easy come, easy go. In 2002, after they’re limping along for a while, they sell that ad network division off for under $15 million with an M. Now all they’ve got left is the software, the ad server part of the business. Flash forward to 2004, they’re this sleepy, slow growth company with a shrinking market cap. The ad server, their software was still widely used, but digital marketing on the web just wasn’t actually having that much spend flow through it. They decided to put themselves up for sale. Google actually took a meeting to look at it to see if they wanted to buy it. They decided not to, eventually they sold it to private equity. Two different firms, Helman and Friedman and JMI management bought it in 2005 for about a billion dollars. IPO day was double this final price tag that they would sell it to private equity for. In many stories, this is the end of the story. This is the start.

David: It’s crazy given the fact pattern that you just told us that two years later Google’s going to buy this thing for $3 billion.

Ben: Yes. David Rosenblatt becomes CEO and he has a very familiar name that all of you will probably recognize who becomes Neal

David: Mohan.

Ben: Yes. The head of product and strategy at the company, Neal Mohan. Neal of course is the CEO of YouTube today. Yep, from DoubleClick  originally,

David: Many would argue the best thing that Google got in the DoubleClick acquisition.

Ben: You could argue that. Now here’s the amazing thing. What happens under the private equity ownership is that they launch a completely different product, this new thing called an ad exchange. When the concept of an ad exchange is first invented, remember it was very straightforward before this, there was just an ad network and some software called an ad server. The ad exchange is this brilliant idea that we can cross route demand between ad networks. At first what this is used for is like the remnant or unsold inventory. We’ve got some page loads. We don’t currently have a buyer in our ad network forum, throw them up on this exchange and see if programmatically some people will bid on it. We will get more dollars this month for the same number of page views. But technically what was going on is it was really sophisticated and it allowed for some crazy stuff to get done. You could bid in real time, including against the publisher’s direct sold ads. Let's say the New York Times has done a specific deal with Ford then in a real time basis.

David: If somebody else is willing to top Ford, then you can displace them.

Ben: Yep, exactly.

David: This sounds a lot like Google, doesn’t it?

Ben: It really created the modern programmatic display advertising for better or for worse. That’s basically what happened here. As a publisher, when you start working with an ad exchange, you can incorporate multiple different networks, agency trading desks. This became a big thing, an ad agencies, you can stand up these complex rules engines. Effectively what happened is you jumped in front of the ad networks, you almost disintermediated them. You’re the lowest level building block that everything else has to integrate with. Eventually what started as this ad exchange that just became used for remnant and unsold ultimately becomes the primary way that digital media is bought on the biggest advertisers with the biggest publishers and all of course bought and sold through these big agencies. Google is running this little thing called AdSense. It’s for smaller publishers and it’s very DIY self-serve. It’s almost like a techie utopian version of how do you run ads on websites. Whereas this ad exchange is let’s acknowledge all the complex realities that exist in all these business relationships, all these purchasing decisions, the way Madison Avenue has evolved from the Mad Men era to this moment in time in the early 2000s.

David: Let’s essentially construct fat pipes for money to flow.

Ben: Yes.

David: Through all this. That is direct integrations into ad agency’s financial systems and the ad agencies control the budgets for all the big brands and all the big dollars that are flowing.

Ben: That’s exactly right. If only Google had a way of unlocking and now participating in these deeply integrated money flows, Google had a few other problems. The way DoubleClick worked and performed a lot of really fancy stuff like frequency capping to make sure you don’t see the same ad 46 times is third party cookies. Google was philosophically opposed to using third party cookies. They couldn’t do stuff like that, but DoubleClick could Google didn’t have a lot of these big sales relationships since at the time, again, they’re very obsessed with self-serve webpages. Advertisers just log in and upload and transact. Google ends up locked out of the best ad inventory advertisers on Google could really only be placed on the long tail of websites, which advertisers were willing to pay less to appear on those websites. Again,

David: We’re all in the AdSense part of the world, not search ads.

Ben: Yes. There are all sorts of things that make them not enterprise grade here. Google decided they’d like to buy double click.

David: Yes. Well that’s the story out there. The reality is, think back to how you started when I interjected and I said, gosh, a lot of what DoubleClick is doing, it really sounds a lot like what Google is doing. Well we were talking to Tim Armstrong for research for this episode. Tim of course was head of sales at Google for many years and we were asking Tim about DoubleClick and he was like, well , I was close with the DoubleClick guys and I wanted to meet with them here in late 2006, early 2007. Just so happened I was going to be in Seattle for some stuff and I was emailing with them and they were like oh, you’re in Seattle, actually we’re in Seattle too right now. We can get together here. Tim immediately sounds the alarm inside Google to Eric and Larry.

David: This is a New York based company. There is only one reason why the double click guys are going to be in Seattle. That would be if Microsoft is going to buy the company. Now back to everything we’ve been talking about all episode, what is Google absolutely not want to have happen here? Well, one is Microsoft to kneecap them by making changes to Internet Explorer or Windows or whatnot. They basically neutralize that through the whole web app, web 2.0 strategy. Now the threat is, oh, Microsoft is finally going to wake up and do what they should have done 10 years ago and compete with us, build their own search engine,

Ben: Right? Be willing to be an ad-based business. Their DNA was. Yeah, we’ll do some ad stuff and MSN has to because it’s a media business, but.

David: We sell software.

Ben: We sell software. That’s what we do primarily, we would never trade our ability to sell software to make money on dirty Ads.

David: Yep.

Ben: Microsoft is realizing that for some set of users, Google’s actually making more money on any given PC user than Microsoft is. They’re not happy with this. to say, fine, we at least just need to be in that game too.

David: Yeah.

Ben: The negotiations are happening with Microsoft and DoubleClick. Tim told us this great anecdote where he’s invited to present and he still thinks it’s like a early stage conversation in the negotiations, and somehow he gets sent to the wrong floor. The person who is escorting him into the DoubleClick building sent them to a floor and they freak out when the door opens and they’re like, try to close the door, like, please go to the other floor. Tim is like, what’s going on here? He steps out, he runs down the hall and he sees a conference room full of all the Microsoft people and their accountants and their lawyers, and he’s like, oh my God, oh my God, you guys, you’re, you’re about to sign this deal with Microsoft. He gets them to hold off so he can kick the tires, do his diligence, submit a counterbid. This is a crazy process that goes back and forth, Yahoo gets involved. There’s a whole presentation series that happens where Yahoo, Microsoft, a AOL and Google are basically all getting the pitch and DoubleClick is now showing,

David: I’m imagining they’re all like in an auditorium and DoubleClick is presenting on stage.

Ben: Dude, there was a spreadsheet called YMAG.xls, and the reason they’ve created it is they’re effectively trying to show in each of these presentations, here’s how much incremental money you’ll make if you own DoubleClick and you tie it into your existing ad system and they’re tweaking the numbers slightly for each one. Google then submits their LOI for $3.1 billion and it includes a clause where they can’t shop the deal around during this diligence period. The whole Google team goes to New York, they rent out this big room at a hotel near DoubleClick’s offices. I’m going to read an excerpt from the book Yield the company’s council. This is DoubleClick, checked her Blackberry and held it up for David Rosenblatt to see. There was an incoming message from Microsoft’s corporate development team. They were willing to match the offer for DoubleClick,.

And the message included an email from Steve Ballmer saying that he opened the door for a much higher offer. Ballmer wrote that if the offer match was not acceptable, DoubleClick should simply mark up the paper to meet its needs and then sign it. Microsoft would review and rapidly countersign to close the deal with minimal negotiation required without saying, so Ballmer was communicating, here’s a blank check, tell me what closes the deal. Ultimately a week goes by and they’re in this period where they can’t really respond and they’re supposed to just proceed with Google. A day before the LOI is set to expire, the DoubleClick team gets an updated term sheet from Google. The financial terms of the deal are unchanged, that 3.1 billion. But now the deal includes what they call a hell or high water clause, which means that Google was committed to closing the deal without any substantive diligence or any other conditions. It’s just money in the bank. No more diligence. DoubleClick just signs it. 3.1 billion and the private equity firm turns that 1 billion, which was levered. It was something like 300 million of equity and 700 million of debt into a $3.1 billion sale to Google. Then it’s over.

David: Not bad work if you can get it.

Ben: Nope.

David: This was huge for Google. DoubleClick, bringing it into Google did really help with those fat money pipes, as I was saying, of dollar flows from ad agencies. But the biggest thing was DoubleClick was the number one player in the space. There was another company, public company called AQuantive that was the number two player.

Ben: Microsoft then bought for twice as much. They were like, we really wish we had gotten DoubleClick then within months

David: It was the next month. Right away Microsoft turned around and bought AQuantive for $6 billion. Twice the price, but Microsoft getting the number two player versus the number one player slowed them down. We’re heading right into Microsoft search efforts with Yahoo and then ultimately Bing and getting into the advertising business worth every penny to Google, even for the sole reason of keeping the premier number one player in the display ad space out of Microsoft’s hands.

Ben: Yep. The one thing I will say here, David, is unlike all those other Google products, maps, Gmail, YouTube, the organizing the world’s information, this is not organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible. We're running an ad business and we want to expand the ad business, and so we’re going to expand and protect our business interests by buying this.

David: It’s a chess piece on the table that it being in our hands versus other people’s hands is better.

Ben: That’s exactly right. There are ways that it like systematically advantages you to own the exchange when you also own the network. This is only checking the box of strengthening our business without checking any of the other boxes and you basically never heard Google executives get up on a stage where they’re inspiring people about the future of the company and talk about basically anything DoubleClick is doing.

David: Yes, correct, even fast forward today, unlike YouTube, it’s not like this has become a world dominating thing.

Ben: Right? If you’re in the display ads world, or you’re a publisher, or this feels like a huge deal if you’re Google, let’s just look at the numbers today. Google in total in 2024 made $350 billion of revenue. About 200 billion of that is from Google search. About 30 billion of that is from Google Network. This falls under Google Network.

David: Plenty of which existed before and would’ve existed anyway in AdSense, regardless.

Ben: I don’t know about that. I don’t know that Google would’ve become the dominant player in display ads.

David: Absent DoubleClick

Ben: Without buying DoubleClick. Yeah. I don’t think.

David: Yeah. But AdSense was probably doing a billion plus in revenue at the time, would’ve kept scaling. All that to say like in the context of Google, this isn’t a YouTube,

Ben: It just doesn’t matter that much, 200 billion in revenue they make from search where they get to keep 90 ish percent of that, after paying out traffic acquisition costs, Google Network, they pay out 70% and they only made 30 billion. If you start thinking about like gross profit, it’s comparing $9 billion to $175 ish billion. It’s just not that consequential to the story.

David: Speaking of search, catch us up on how the search business is doing during these years and why Microsoft finally said like, okay, enough, we got to enter this business ourselves.

Ben: We've been talking about the sideshows, like trying to add wind to the sales of the web and search is cranking on improvements to the core product and revenue is growing up right along with it. Here's a little timeline to catch us up. Oh three to oh eight, they start updating the index more often. The index starts to feel not quite real time, but it used to be that when you would search, you would be getting results that were indexed three months ago. Now the web is feeling a little bit more

David: Real timey

Ben: Recent when you’re searching it. They launched Google Images, Google News, Google Books, Google Scholar. They launched Google Suggest, which is when it starts auto completing your searches. Later they would launch something called Google Instant, which was very cool at the time it’s actually gone away now, where it would run a completely new search based on every character you typed and show you the results page updated in real time with each next keystroke, which was pretty amazing.

David: I remember that being so cool when it launched.

Ben: Yeah. In 2005, they incorporate your search history into your results. This is when they start doing some personalization stuff with logged in users. They go from, in 2004 they had 3 billion in revenue, 2005 they have 6 billion in revenue doubled even at that scale. In 2007, they launched universal search across web images, video whatever maps they try to deconstruct your query and understand which of these things are you looking for, rather than, they used to basically build a completely separate search engine for each media type and then leave it up to you to decide which thing to go search.

That year when they launched Universal Search, they do 16.5 billion in revenue. This 2007 year, this is when they become the largest seller of advertisements in the world, not just digital ads. Ads and digital ads would not overtake traditional media until 2018, as we talked about earlier.

David: Yeah, I was trying to square this. I guess that means that the market share that Google has of digital ads is so high, is massive, that it’s bigger than even in the traditional space of the TV space, what any one player has.

Ben: Yes. Every year for the last 18 years, Google has been the number one seller of advertising of any kind in the world.

David: Wow.

Ben: This I think, helps you understand a little bit what’s at stake in the era of AI. This is literally the trillion or five or $10 trillion question is, can Google keep being the number one seller of advertising in the world, even through this sea change? We should do a whole episode on that, probably maybe we’ll for next time.

David: Maybe next time

Ben: Yeah. But actually there are some great corollaries with the mobile wave that we’re about to talk about. Then just to pull forward a few more search improvements that they would do later in 2009, that’s when they really do some real time indexing of the web. 2012, they launched the knowledge graph,when you search about a, basically a thing with a Wikipedia page, you always get the snapshot view on the right hand side of that entity. All along the way they’re tweaking the algorithm and an attempt to reduce spam. That’s effectively the product changes on the people side of things.

They really had solidified themselves as the preeminent computer science research company at this point. If you were to refer in 2008 to a really smart programmer, you probably said, oh, they're like a Google type engineer. They took the mantle from Microsoft and had not yet relinquished it to Facebook or later to the Stripe or Open AI or Anthropic or any of the companies we would talk about in the future as this like dense concentration of the best engineers.

They had pulled in a lot of the people from the big research labs that had been collapsing, you had Jeff Dean and Sanjay Gemma Watt coming from Deck. David, we did Sanjay a total disservice on the last episode. A lot of the stuff that Jeff did, and of course he became a Google executive, Jeff and Sanjay Pure program together.

David: Yes, there’s an amazing New Yorker article that was published long ago about their friendship and career partnership and everything that they accomplished together.

Ben: Yeah, we’ll link to it in the show notes. Basically, if you look at any big research paper about giant Google infrastructure stuff that was launched from, I don’t know, 2002 ish, maybe even earlier through the 20 teens, Jeff and Sanjay are either the two authors or two of the five authors. It's amazing how much stuff these two guys invented. They also got Bill Corin and Rob Pike from Bell Labs. You had Xerox PARC and IBM’s labs were losing prominence. Google’s just sucking in all this generational heavy hitter computer science architecture systems programmers from all of those. I think that’s how I would describe where a lot of the technical breakthroughs are really coming from, or at least the culture of technical breakthroughs.

David: We talked about these incredible products, incredible innovations, development of the whole concept of a web application. But that was coming from these people that were coming into the company who were just, like you say, generational talents. Speaking of that was very convenient for a couple of things that they needed to start doing in 2008, namely launching their own web browser and then shortly thereafter launching their own mobile operating system.

Ben: It’s astonishing that they did both of these things

David: In the same year.

Ben: And this isn’t like, oh, I’m going to start a browser the way that you can start a browser today. All these AI companies are launching browsers.  

David: They’re using chromium.

Ben: Right. This is a giant engineering undertaking. You need amazing architects. This is equivalent to Dave Cutler doing Windows NT. It was earth shattering when Google launched Chrome.

David: Or everything Jeff Dean and Sanjay did in their early days of Google.

Ben: Yes.

David: And when I say people launching web browsers today are using Chromium, Chromium, of course, is the open source version of Chrome. That Google just gives away for free to anybody that didn’t exist, they had to build it. In February of 2008, the shoe that Google had been fearing would drop for many, many years, finally does drop, which is Microsoft is officially going to enter the search business. They make a bid, Microsoft does to buy Yahoo for $44 billion. The giant has finally woken up. Fortunately for Google, they get a little bit of a reprieve because Jerry Yang turns it down.

Ben: So dumb.

David: In one of the worst corporate decisions of all time, because just two years later, Bing, after Microsoft would launch Bing the next year in June of 2009, Bing would take over powering Yahoo search for a deal that paid Yahoo, $1 billion, versus the 44 that two years earlier, Microsoft was willing to pay for the whole company.

Ben: And then Yahoo would sell itself to Verizon for..

David: Like three, I think. Something like that.

Ben: Something like that. Yeah. Single digit billions.

David: Yes. Google though, knew this day was going to come eventually. Unfortunately, by this time in 2008, Google had its competitive response all ready, ready to go, which was Chrome.

Ben: And they had actually been working on improving the state of browsers for years.

David: Oh yes they have. The story of Chrome goes all the way back to 2001. Larry and Sergey wanted to build a web browser in 2001 for this very reason that we’ve been talking about the whole episode. All of Google rested on,

Ben: I didn’t realize that.

David: Internet Explorer and also, it was Larry and Sergey, of course, they wanted to build a web browser. It’s the most Google thing. Why wouldn’t we build our own web browser? Right. But it was Eric who said in 2001, no, we can’t do this now. We can’t poke the bear right now. Like Google is too young, too vulnerable.

Ben: Calls like this are why Larry and Sergey brought in Eric.

David: Yes. The actual quote from Eric at the time, this is in In the Plex, is I don’t want to moon the giant in 2001.

Ben: It’s a very Eric Schmidt quote.

David: But that doesn’t mean that Google isn’t preparing for this. Instead, what they do is they decide that they are going to become the primary major benefactor for the new Mozilla Foundation. what would become Firefox. Mozilla was the nonprofit organization that was founded and spun off from Netscape. When AOL bought Netscape.

Ben: Are they a funder? Are they actually just like giving money?

David: Well, I think at first it probably was like with grants like giving money. Again, this is strategically important for Google. But then once Firefox actually gets released by Mozilla and deployed out there, the way Google starts supporting Mozilla and Firefox is through paying traffic acquisition cost to them to be the default search in the Firefox browser. Spoiler alert, like they do to Apple for Safari today to the tune of like $20 billion a year.

Ben: Yes.

David: Firefox is where this all starts with Mozilla

Ben: Actually traffic acquisition costs originated before Mozilla because it’s effectively the same thing that they were doing with software vendors to include Google toolbar. Right. I think the mechanism of payment over time shifted to more of a rev share. My understanding now is that they share some of the revenue they generate from queries that originate.

David: Searches that happen in the browser.

Ben: Exactly. Which is why it ends up being variable year to year. But yes, Google has a long history of paying for distribution of their search engine. The new form that it is now taking is the Mozilla Firefox browser.

David: Yep. Starting with toolbar. This goes on for a couple of years,

Ben: And by the way, I should say Google becomes a giant contributor of source code to Firefox.

David: Well.

Ben: Oh, is that where you’re going?

David: I’m going to get into this. A couple of years, Google’s paying Mozilla for default search and Firefox basically funding Mozilla. After a little while Google decides that they’re going to hire some of the key Firefox engineers at Mozilla to come and work at Google directly. But they position this as like, essentially this is the same thing. We are still funding Mozilla and Firefox just like you’re Mozilla, you can’t give these employees these engineers stock options like you’re a nonprofit. How about instead they do the same thing that they’re doing, which is working on Firefox. They’ll just come and work here at Google and we’ll pay their salaries and they’ll get Google stock options, otherwise they’re going to get poached by all these tech companies, et cetera, et cetera.

Ben: Fascinating.

David: You can see how this makes sense. This team that comes over from Mozilla into Google becomes the core of a new product client group within Google. Meaning of this being products on clients, IE installed applications on PCs, not the web apps that the rest of new Google is doing. The leader of this group, Google hires from McKinsey in 2004, Sundar Pichai.

Ben: Oh, I did not realize that. That’s where Sundar came from.

David: Yep. Well again, all of this is very strategic because if you did someday want to build your own web browser.

Ben: Now you’ve got the bench of talent, their employees.

David: So there’s a quote from Eric Schmidt in In the Plex. This was very clever on Larry and Sergey’s part because of course these people doing Firefox are perfectly capable of going and doing another great web browser. This group is sitting there within Google for a couple of years, almost like a latent sleeper cell within Google. They’re just ready to activate as soon as the Microsoft threat becomes real.

Ben: The way I heard it was a lot of people are working on Google Gears, which is this browser extension that allows for offline functionality. They’ve built the Google web toolkit to make web application development even more advanced, even more sophisticated. At some point they lost faith that Firefox was going to keep the pace and that Firefox was going to stay as high quality of a browser as they needed it. Of course they had some divergent technical ideas, like different architecture ideas for how a browser should function that we’ll talk about.

David: I think all of these things are true. However, having your own browser when Microsoft does launch Bing, hugely, hugely, hugely important. Imagine if 90% of Google happened on Internet Explorer and all of a sudden Microsoft launches Bing.

Ben: Right? There’s no amount of money suddenly that you could pay Microsoft where they would keep you as the default search engine.  They just want all the traffic to go to Bing. because They now have a great way to monetize.

David: Absolutely not Bing default search engine done.

Ben: The thing that of course Microsoft would fail to realize with Bing is you can’t be second place in search.

David: Right?

Ben: The most liquid auction will always win and Google has already run away with the search ads auction liquidity. Traffic on Google searches will forever be worth more than traffic on the second place browser.

David: Sure. Doesn’t mean that that battle wouldn’t be hugely damaging to Google if they didn’t have their own web browser. 2006 they finally decide, okay, it’s time to start work on Chrome.  It’s clear web apps, JavaScript, AJAX, very important thing and Internet Explorer isn’t keeping up with the technology. There are two killer features, arguably maybe three that they’re going to bake into the Google browser.

Ben: I’ve got six. Oh. I’m curious which ones you don’t think are important.

David: I’ll go through my three and then I’ll see what else you have to add. Number one most important, it is going to have a super fast, super modern, super performant, JavaScript virtual machine called V8. That is going to run big web apps fast and stably.

Ben: We’re the AJAX company baby, we got to speed up the J.

David: That’s right. Two, web apps crashed a lot back in the day. They don’t so much anymore, but they used to crash a lot.

Ben: And Larry has this quote when they’re deciding that they should roll out Chrome and he explains, we have found the web-based service delivery model to have significant advantages. you don’t say, but it also comes with its own set of challenges, primarily related to web browsers, which can be slow, unreliable, and unable to function offline.

David: There you go. Before Chrome, this is impossible to remember now, but if you had a tab or a window open and running a web app and that web app crashed, it took down your whole browser. Everything that you had open gone

Ben: Tabs were not their own processes.

David:  Nope, so each tab is going to be a separate process on your machine. If the web app running in one tab crashes, all it takes down is that one tab.

Ben: And it made sense that before this they weren’t their own process because one tabs were a new thing, but two web applications were websites. The notion of web applications was only really four-ish years old.

David: Those are my big two. I suspect one of yours is WebKit. I’m not including WebKit here because that was an Apple innovation. Yeah. That they borrowed. I’ll let you talk about that in a sec.

Ben: I don’t have any more to say on that. It was the best rendering engine.

David: Yes. Let's say that’s three and then my three and a half is the design. The web browser ultimately comes to be called Chrome, which is ironic. Chrome is a reference to all the stuff in a web browser that toolbar the NAB bar, et cetera, that take up space around the content. The idea with Chrome is, and the Google web browser is going to be minimal chrome as little as possible. It’s just about the content. Let the web and the web apps shine.

Ben: Yes. Okay. When you said UI, I thought you were going to say this, my fifth is the Omnibox.

David: Ah, yes.

Ben: Originally there was just the URL bar and then when search became the killer app of the web, there’s a second little input box that is for search on the right side. We had that awkward teenage years where browsers had the URL bar on the left and then the search on the right and it’s clean to think about it on its own because now that we understand that that is sponsored, that I think for the longest time that was not in the public psyche, that whatever search engine appeared in that box in the right hand corner was paying for that placement. That was nice because you type in the URL bar and that’s your organic typing and then the other one is your I’m willing to give a kickback to Google probably, but it could also be Bing, could be Yahoo, could be whoever, Google correctly from a user experience perspective. But also just think about their core business model is like the right design for web browsers is that if you don’t type a URL, it should just search.

David: Just one bar. Why have two bars?

Ben: Imagine that generating a whole bunch more page views on search results pages and a whole bunch more opportunities for our advertisers to reach your eyeballs. But I will say they were also correct from a user experience perspective, the fact that URLS ever leaked to the public is a mistake that is letting an implementation detail of the technology.

David: It’s an accident of history that consumers type.

Ben: https:// Are you kidding me? Consumers never should have known the phrase http.

David: They should just type New York Times.

Ben: Yes. Which AOL tried to do, AOL keywords. This is effectively leaning into that idea of you can use this box for typing URLs but really what you use this box for is kicking off the Google search so brilliantly aligned with their business model.

David: All right. That's what I got. What else do you have that’s not on my list.

Ben: That’s five, then lastly, Sandboxing. Each tab is a sandboxed environment. This prevented a ton of malware. This was like a big breakthrough in computer security where anything that was operating in that tab was in its own Sandboxing, couldn’t be accessed maliciously.

David: That’s I guess, gosh, remembering back, before Chrome and modern web browsers browsing the web was like a security threat to your pc.

Ben: Yep, that’s exactly right.

David: Great point. Okay, they start work officially on this in 2006. They launch it in early September, 2008, like a week before Lehman goes down. This is wild.

Ben: I remember that because I remember sitting in North Carolina at my Cisco office and I remember reading the Chrome comic, which I actually just read a couple of nights ago for this episode. This like amazing web comic, at the same desk where I read the news about the great financial crisis and the world falling apart and Lehman Brothers collapsing.

David: Wow. They launch it early September, 2008 with the way this is so Google, the way they decide to launch it is they hire the famous comic artist Scott McLeod to illustrate a digital comic book as like a introduction to Chrome explaining what it is and like a user manual in a comic book form.

Ben: It’s written for this weird half user who’s like technical, but you don’t need to be a programmer necessarily. It’s written for the tech enthusiast who can understand process independence, understand sandboxing, understand V8 and the JavaScript speed up, but it’s not written for the general public.

David: Yeah. But that was exactly the right seed crystal user base to get Chrome.

Ben: Yeah.

David: Into.

Ben: Yeah, it’s written for the Slashdot reader.

David: The people who are going to go home for Thanksgiving in a couple of months and install it on all their family’s computers and say you need to stop using Internet Explorer right now for all of these reasons Ben, that you just listed, probably security being number one amongst them. This is actually was me back in the day, like I’m going to go home, I’m going to install Chrome on my parents’ computers so that they don’t get hacked and lose their financial information, et cetera.

Ben: Within 18 months they got 40 million users. Then let’s see, they launched it in 2008. By 2010 they had 70 million users then 2012 they had 200 million users. Actually what happened is it destroyed Firefox’s market share and I think the launch of Chrome and the peak of Firefox are right around the same time. After that, then it really started eating away at Internet Explorers market share. Today, aside from mostly iPhones but Apple devices running Safari, it is the browser.

David: To say it worked is like the understatement of the century. It totally liberates Google from Internet Explorer and Microsoft. When Chrome launched in 2008, Internet Explorer had almost 70% market share of browsers and Firefox had most of the rest. Two years later, like you said, Chrome had passed 100 million users by 2012, so four years after launch. Chrome and Internet Explorer are now tied for market share with about 30% each. Internet Explorer has gone from 70% down to 30% and this is both Chrome on the desktop side, but you’re now also well into the rise of mobile. Apple’s mobile Safari is now becoming huge and Google’s Android that we’re going to talk about in a sec is becoming huge. Two years after that, in 2014, Chrome is now the clear leader with 40% market share. Internet Explorer is down to 15%. It’s over. Internet Explorer is basically dead at this point and today it truly is dead.

Ben: 2013, 14.

David: Yeah. 2013, 14. Today it’s not even close. Chrome has almost 70% market share according to CloudFlare.

Ben: Including iPhones, which all run Safari default.

David: Right. Safari in aggregate across mobile and desktop of mobile is by far the biggest share of Safari market share is about 20%. Chrome has 70%, safari has 20%, there’s 10% left. I think Microsoft, I don’t know, has a couple of single digit percentage points. Talk about flipping the tables. Chrome was massive.

Ben: And it was just better. It was so much better and it really kicked off this amazing era for the web between Apple needing to then play catch up and leapfrog in a lot of years. It was actually faster than Chrome and they would go back and forth and it really spurred Apple who was already a steward of WebKit and they had their own competitive response to Microsoft after Steve Jobs hated the fact that he had to keep shipping IE as his best option on Mac.

David: That was part of the Microsoft Apple deal. When Microsoft saved Apple, what the investment was, Internet Explorer will become default right on the Mac.

Ben: Safari was created for that. But over the years Apple’s incentives, especially post iPhone, were not to make it so web apps could be great. Apple’s incentives were to make it so native mobile and desktop applications could be great. Google, really pushing the envelope in the web’s capabilities and what a modern browser could do. Forced this like good for the world race between Apple and Google to both make better browsers.

David: I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that Chrome kept the web alive.

Ben: Yeah.

David: As a viable platform for applications.

Ben: Yep. Microsoft certainly didn’t have an incentive to do it in the business model they were in at the time and Apple doesn’t,

David: They had every incentive not to. Wait, who in the world least wants the web to be a viable application platform? Microsoft,

Ben: Right? At that point in time. Apple. Now, ironically,

David: There’s one more amazing, delicious part of the Chrome story, which is, do you remember the Google Chrome frame? Google Chrome frame was a plugin for Internet Explorer that replaced IE’s JavaScript engine and pulled in the Chrome V8 JavaScript engine and I think also WebKit. For all the corporate users,

Ben: Who couldn’t install a new app

David: America in the world who were stuck with Internet Explorer. This is the only reason that IE hung onto market share for so long was just right.

Ben: Lockdown PCs

David: For all those poor souls, Google was there for you with the Google Chrome frame plugin that let you run Chrome quality web apps within Internet Explorer. Amazing.

Ben: All right. I have a question for you on Chrome before we finish this story. Why make chromium open source?

David: The answer that I’ve read to that is mostly about the Google culture and trying not to be too evil about it.

Ben: Yeah, I would buy that. They’re like an open source company. Like it’s in their bones to contribute to open source. There’s a thin business reason I can think of why they would want to make it open source.

David: The reason I can think of is like it doesn’t need to be closed source. They make their money from searches.

Ben: Right? That's like it can’t hurt. Here’s the way it could help. At first I was thinking, well wait, Google wants to own as many of the browsers that it searches originate from as they can so they don’t have to pay out distribution costs in the form of traffic acquisition. If someone takes Chromium and then builds a better browser, it’s bad because now you have to pay that browser maker. But in practice, as long as it’s not Microsoft and as long as it’s more fragmented, that’s probably a trade they’re perfectly happy with. If they need to go and split some rev share and pay someone who makes some variant of Chrome based on Chromium and that gets really big and it gets 30% of the market. Great. Google’s delighted. because it’s not Microsoft.

David: Look, except for traffic acquisition cost, Google’s incremental gross margin on search revenue is like 98% or something like that. There’s still going to be an 87% gross margin business.

Ben: The whole point of this was to prevent a existential risk. If they have to do some light rev sharing, even in their worst case scenario where someone builds a successful thing based on their open source project.

David: Oh so horrible. We go down to 87% gross margin.

Ben: Right. It’s still perfectly acceptable. Which actually may be the way it plays out if any of these new AI browsers work out.

David: Yeah.

Ben: Maybe.

David: Well not sure any of these AI browsers would be willing to let Google to pay them to be the default thing

Ben: Right. Big chess game to consider there.

David: That is the one catch is the owner of the browser still has to be willing to accept the payment from Google.

Ben: Yes. I have one analogy for all of this that is a little far afield but I think is actually the right way to think about this.

David: Okay. Laid on me.

Ben: Walt Disney creates Disneyland, goes great. Very handcrafted, curated, auteur driven thing. But ultimately he has to play within the rules of things like city government.

David: Okay.

Ben: They go big and get a huge plot of land in Florida to build Walt Disney World. It would be nice if we controlled our underlying foundation a little bit more. They build their own government district around the park and they say we make the rules here.

David: It’s not totally dissimilar.

Ben: Yep. I’ve been reflecting a little bit on why basically from 1998 onward, Google’s biggest threat was Microsoft and not because of Bing, not because of building advertising because of this destabilizing thing. There’s a fine point on it, which is that spiritually Microsoft was the platform of the PC era and with this platform shift it would be very convenient to just be like, oh, Google’s the platform of the web era. But even though Google is the platform company of the web era, they aren’t necessarily the ones building the platform.

David: Right? They still existed at Microsoft’s pleasure.

Ben: And no one owns the web as a platform. There's this funky thing where Microsoft built and owned Windows and then dominated the PC era because of that. Google operates a search engine that generates advertising revenue. They don’t charge anyone for anything. They benefit from the web’s growth. They're doing this strange indirection.

David: The ecosystem building exercise.

Ben: Yeah, exactly. They’re trying to build the ecosystem. They’re trying to be the steward of the open web as a platform and they put their finger on the scale where they need to and take a little bit more control and ownership like with Chrome or like with some of these standards bodies to push the web forward to make sure that the place where they live, their neighborhood, the web is in good shape, but it’s not their platform in the way that it was Microsoft’s platform in that era.

David: Maybe the Disney World analogy is even better than we gave it credit for a minute ago.

Ben: I don’t know, it’s a little bit loose, but that’s what I’ve been kicking around.

David: I like it. Well no doubt Chrome was a huge success. Sundar becomes the CEO of the company. No better sign of how successful it was than that.

Ben: It shored up their future and we could do a classic Acquired, what would’ve happened otherwise, just for a minute or two here. What if Google didn’t launch Chrome? Let’s say Bing launches in 2009 and there is no Chrome and Microsoft still has 70% share and will for a while.

David: Yep.

Ben: They make Bing the default. Let’s see, mobile would get big three, four years later in the 2012 ish timeframe.

David: Still small.

Ben: They basically would have like four years of 70% of people using browsers on any devices being defaulted to Bing.

David: Now obviously a lot of people would still want Google. They were used to it, they’d switch back. But like, I don’t know man. Defaults are powerful.

Ben: Defaults are powerful. I think you’re right.

David: This is why Google pays Apple $20 billion a year.

Ben: Yeah. To your point, maybe without Chrome, Bing would’ve been a serious competitor to Google.

David: There is no more important distribution point for search than the web browser.

Ben: It is the way to monetize a browser. Basically the single way to monetize a browser.

David: Yep.

Ben: Which let’s make this relevant to today and stop dancing. If the DOJ’s ruling is that Google has to divest Chrome. There is one way that Chrome is a business and that is getting paid by Google to drive traffic to Google as a search engine. It’s the only way to operate a business of a browser. Maybe in the AI era, it’s the AI company having it drive traffic. But it’s the same exact thing. One of two things has to be true, Google owns Chrome or someone else owns Chrome and then Google pays them. Definitely can’t make illegal or I don’t really understand what the goal is, if you make it illegal is if you say they both can’t own Chrome and they can’t pay web browsers to drive traffic, Chrome has no potential of being a business if that’s the case.

David: Yep. Chrome, huge win. In fact, it’s so much of a win that after a couple of years Google starts thinking, well gosh, maybe we should build Chrome into an operating system in and of itself, let’s go attack Windows. Let’s take it to Microsoft where it really hurts Chrome OS, you know? But it became successful in schools in education.

Ben: Chromebooks.

David: Yeah. Chromebooks have major market shares there, but it’s not a major player in the overall PC operating system market. It is wild how much the PC computer operating system market is still dominated by Windows. That has never changed. You and I live in this world where like everybody uses a Mac, Mac has like 15% market share. Windows has like 70% market share of computer operating systems. Well, speaking of operating systems,

Ben: It’s time.

David: I think it’s probably time to talk about Google’s big one.

Ben: Yes.

David: Which is actually the biggest operating system in the world.

Ben: Over 3 billion active Android devices now.

David: Totally freaking wild that they bought for $50 million.

Ben: Well that’s a red herring. They’ve invested so much more. But just to make the point, it is hit after hit after hit. These things are not predicated on Google’s distribution. If you’re a company that launches a new widget and you can just distribute it with your old widget, it’s not that impressive when your new widget gets dominance. But Google Chrome, they could do a little thing and they did push it on Google search pages, but they managed to get a lot of distribution just by being a great product on the market with viral adoption that everyone told their friends to use. It was the David Rosenthal’s going home to Thanksgiving that were like the seed of it. Then within three or four years they just ran the table. It's not just Chrome,  Gmail was that way. Google Docs and spreadsheets were that way maps was that way.

David:  It’s everything, everything.

Ben: All these things are independent, great products that became dominant on their own merits just like Google Search did.

David: Yes, I 100% agree. Also helped by the fact that they were all free.

Ben: Yes. Fair and massively subsidized, at least in the early years before they were able to be businesses on their own by the old money printing machine in the basement of Google.

David: Good old Uncle AdWords. Yes. But before we tell the Android story.

Ben: Now is a great time to thank one of our favorite companies, Vercel.

David: Yes. We have talked throughout the season about Vercel has become the infrastructure backbone for modern web and AI development. Highly relevant to this episode, powering companies like PayPal, Ramp, Under Armour, Notion, Runway Cursor, and many more. Today though, we want to spotlight V0, which is Vercel’s AI app builder that goes one step further and programs designs, iterates and deploys full stack web applications entirely for you.

Ben: V0 is a chat bot that looks like Claude or chat GPT or Gemini. Except that when you give it a prompt, it will go build an entire fully functional website or application entirely for you. No engineering or web design skills are required. You don’t need to look at a single line of code or mock up a wire frame so a marketer can stand up a product landing page or a small business can generate a homepage in a contact form or a creator can spin up an independent content hub, anything.

David: Vercel loves to paraphrase the famous line from Pixar’s Ratatouille that quote, “everybody can cook”, which is an especially fun Easter egg for us. Since Pixar was our very first Acquired episode and the numbers behind V0 are wild, it now has 4 million users. PMs, marketers, creators, founders, teachers, students, all building real production ready applications on this thing.

Ben: Speaking of production, every single V0 app you generate can be deployed to production instantly with Vercel because V0 itself entirely runs on Vercel’s platform, you go from prompt to full stack deployment with zero setup using the same secure, scalable, automatic infrastructure that powers sites like Ramp Notion and Under Armour.

David: It’s the perfect example of Versal being customer zero for their own products. They’re using their own AI cloud to power their own AI products.

Ben: If you’ve got an idea that you want to launch, whether you’re a seasoned developer or someone who’s never written a line of code, go to vercel.com/acquired, that’s vercel.com/acquired and try it out. Build something real and just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

David: All right, Android. Google’s office spaces are legendary. The first one of course being Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Mountain View Companies first office and then today the Google Plex, the old SGI Silicon Graphics campus in Mountain View. In between Google had another office for a couple of years in downtown Palo Alto at 165 University Avenue would also later be the office that PayPal was started it.

Ben: Oh really?

David: Very lucky building. Yeah. August, 1999 when Google moved out of that office. Do you know who moved in?

Ben: Based on the direction this is going? Is it Danger?

David: Yes it is. Danger. The company started by Andy Rubin and Andy of course had been an engineer at Apple and then left Apple with a group of rebels. I don’t know, were they rebels that went to go start General Magic. General Magic, of course. Legendary failed startup in Silicon Valley in the early nineties. Basically was trying to create the iPhone just 15 years too early.  After General Magic, after it falls apart, he starts danger. Now Andy’s initial idea for danger was he wanted to make a wireless version of the Qcat scanner.

Ben: What is a Qcat scanner?

David: This was a device that plugged into your computer that looks like a cat, but it scanned barcodes. Andy’s idea was, okay, well man, all this general magic stuff we were trying to do that was too far ahead. What if we think simpler and we just make a wireless version of this to scan barcodes. Okay, not a big idea. His first employee at Danger, a guy named Hiroshi Lockheimer convinces him that, hey, actually a couple of years have gone by, maybe we should revisit this general magic stuff.

Ben: Wait, Hiroshi was with him at Danger.

David: He was the first employee.

Ben: I did not know that.

David: Yep. Yes, he was.

Ben: I Mean he of course is instrumental in the Android story. Later I did not realize the two of them were at Danger together too.

David: I spoke to Hiroshi in research, he told me these stories. Great, great guy, Hiroshi led Android and Chrome at Google for many, many years and would be the authority on this. Hiroshi’s like, hey, hey, maybe let’s revisit this general magic stuff. That led to Danger building the sidekick and launching it in partnership with T-Mobile. This thing was amazing.

Ben: That thing was so sick. I was jealous of all my friends that had one.

David: It was a messaging focused rich application cell phone. I think it was along with Blackberry’s the first vision of a cell phone where the primary thing you do on it is not talk to somebody.

Ben: Is messaging.

David: These things were freaking awesome. They were really big with celebrities. I think it was a plot of an entourage episode at some point in time.

Ben: So they end up selling this company to Microsoft.

David: Yes, Microsoft does end up acquiring the company, but not until 2008, which is the same year that Android launches. Andy actually had left Danger in 2003 and started a new company, Android.

Ben: Which in the earliest days, it was like an open source competitor to effectively Blackberry software.

David: Yes. In its earliest, earliest days, the first version of Android, the company, remember I was talking about point and shoot cameras and digital cameras back in the YouTube section?

Ben: Yeah.

David: Was actually to build a cross platform open source operating system for point and shoot digital cameras.

Ben: Oh wow.

David: Yeah. That was Andy’s vision was like, oh hey these point and shoot devices, like hundreds of millions of consumers have them. Now what if there were a powerful operating system? Could that be a Trojan horse to get an operating system? You could imagine it.

Ben: Right? If cameras became phones instead of phones becoming cameras, then yes.

David: Yep. Exactly. But pretty quickly it does become clear that phones are going to become cameras. Good thing is though, the software they’re writing still works just as well on phones. Andy pivots the company and has the delivery vector shift from cameras to smartphones. At the time the smartphone markets such that it existed and it did exist.

Ben: Blackberry Windows Mobile.

David: Well, yeah. Here are the players, basically phone companies either were full stack like Apple and the iPhone is today where they made the phone and the operating system that was Nokia. Then the big player in the smartphone market at least was Blackberry made their own software, made their own devices huge in the enterprise market or you did have OEMs device makers who made devices and then they bought an operating system either from Palm, which made their own devices, but then also started selling the operating system to other vendors. Or the big player was Microsoft with Windows Mobile.

Ben: And this was a licensed model as we talked about in our Microsoft part two. This was you pay Microsoft single digit dollars and you get an operating system and then you build the phone stuff on top of the operating system.

David: Exactly, this was a good business for Microsoft. Obviously it wasn’t as big as the desktop market, but you can totally understand why this is their strategy. We are the main desktop operating system provider. This is our business bottle there. Let’s just do the same thing here. It seems to be working.

Ben: Yep.

David: As far as the phone manufacturers, the OEMs and the carriers are concerned, things are also pretty good. These phones that they’re making, they can’t really do that much, but because of that, they don’t actually cost that much to make. The consumers meanwhile are paying through the nose for these things. You have a smartphone on a carrier contract, you’re paying like $100 a month.

Ben: And they don’t consume that much data either because they're not that capable.

David: Everybody is fat and happy. Into this morass that also Steve Jobs is of course looking at the same thing and saying, this sucks. Enter Andy and Android,  he goes around and he starts pitching the phone manufacturers and the carriers, hey, stop buying an operating system from Microsoft or from Palm. I’ll give you a great one for free and oh by the way, it’s going to be open source and there’ll be third party applications that can be written to it. These devices will be super powerful. The ecosystem’s like no, I don’t want this. One, there’s just no way in hell that AT&T or Verizon is going to work with a little rinky-dink startup that’s valued at like $10 million and has eight employees. There are billions and billions of dollars at stake here. But the other part of it too, I think the reason that the smartphone market had stagnated for so long was this. Everybody was happy.

Ben: It’s a non-priority to upset the apple cart.

David: It’s almost like a version of enterprise software in it. Right? The users don’t like it, but the users aren’t actually the customers here as it’s the carriers who are the customers.

Ben: Yep.

David: So 2005 rolls around, Andy’s now two years into the company with Android. He’s managed to convince HTC, the Taiwanese manufacturer, to make a prototype with him. He’s showing it to carriers, he’s showing it to other OEMs. But for all the reasons we just discussed, it’s tough [inaudible: 02:35:13] out there. The company’s running out of money as Andy is going around trying to gin up investment for another round. He ends up meeting with Larry Page. Larry immediately is like, forget raising another round. What if I buy you right now? So July, 2005, Google buys Android for $50 million, five zero million dollars for Android. Oh my goodness.

Ben: But of course that’s the fallacy because they would pour billions  in development.

David: Yeah they put billions. I know, but like to your point, this episode, Google is the hit factory here. This is the hit parade.

Ben: The correct way to think about Android is that Google built it in-house with a little kick in the pants from this startup. Got far enough along with the idea that forced them to do it now.

David: But they needed the kick in the pants.

Ben: Yes.

David: Because why was Larry so excited? Why did they buy Android right away? Eric and Larry and Sergey, they all knew that they were late to mobile. Here we are, it’s now mid 2005. Hmm. We’re 18 months away from the reveal of the iPhone. Apple and Google are very close.

Ben: Why do you think they knew that they were late?

David: I’m sure they were starting to get wind from Apple of what was going on. That’s

Ben: True. Eric’s on the board at this point of Apple.

David: He’s not yet on the board, but he’s about to join the board. But the companies are very close.

Ben: Okay.

David: But even let’s say they don’t know about the iPhone. Blackberry is a thing.

Ben: Yep.

David: Big adoption. Smartphones and even Windows mobile, as bad as it was, prove that there is demand, there is clearly consumer demand for this.

Ben: They had a version of google.com for these devices to access and they could see the traffic.

David: They really knew it. Especially from maps, Google Maps on mobile devices. Smartphones was a killer application. Google is maintaining, I kid you not 350 different versions of Google Maps for mobile, for all the just sea of phones out there.

Ben: We have built our local government district on the desktop around our Disney World and oh, looks like mobile needs a district too.

David: Yeah, you’re right. They would’ve done this anyway but they were starting to feel already like, oh shoot, we should have started this two years ago buying Android kickstarts things from the Google perspective, thank God they did. Because we’re 18 months away from the iPhone launch and if they are starting from a cold start in January, 2007, good luck. We’re not telling this story right now.

Ben: If they don’t buy Android and they don’t get started basically in the month that they did, this market belongs to Microsoft

David: or Apple

Ben:. No, Microsoft.

David: Oh, why do you say Microsoft?

Ben: There are going to be two players in this market.

David: Ah, I see what you’re saying.

Ben: There’s going to be a fully integrated player, which Apple was going to be and then there’s going to be an OEM plus licensed operating system. The model would’ve just been that Microsoft sells operating systems, a mobile operating system. Great point to the OEMs who were freaking out that Apple was going to run away with it.

David: Great point. Now back to Android and why Android was especially so attractive. Andy already had the right business model for Google. It’s just that as Android, the startup OEMs and carriers are like giving it to me for free. Like that makes you less attractive to me. But now all of a sudden within Google, they can run the playbook that they run everywhere they go, the carriers, the OEMs.

Ben: It’s funny how giving it away for free as a startup is counter signal. It makes you look desperate. But if you’re Google it’s like, oh, they must have a really good plan here.

David: Yeah, exactly. They start work on Android as part of Google here in summer of 2005. The plan initially is that there are going to be two versions of Android. There’s a prototype and a device that will be more near term to launch called the quote unquote sooner the more Blackberry like device, not a touchscreen device. Then there was a longer term advanced research project code named the Dream for a touchscreen smartphone device. Summer of 2006, that next year Eric Schmidt joins the Apple Board.

Ben: Sees how far along and how good the iPhone is.

David: And then January of 2007, the iPhone is revealed in the greatest corporate presentation keynote of all time.

Ben: Yeah.

David: Eric is in the freaking keynote. Steve Jobs invites Eric Schmidt on stage

Ben: And Android hasn’t been announced yet.

David: Nope. Nobody knows about Android.

Ben: This is in January of 07, then July of 07 is when it shipped.

David: July of 07. Yes, is when the iPhone shipped. Now I believe Eric had disclosed to Steve about the Sooner project because obviously it was public that Google had acquired Android and I believe that Steve Jobs knew that Google was working on like a Blackberry style phone, but he did not know about the Dream prototype. Eric comes on stage and here you go, watch this. We’ll link to this in this clip in the show notes. It’s crazy. It’s about a three minute long total thing. Eric comes on stage, he makes a joke about merging the companies that like Apple and Google are so close they should merge. He says the companies should be called Apple Goo. Then he jokes and he says, well, but here’s the way with the iPhone that we can merge the companies without actually merging.

Ben: He’s making these jokes and the camera is focused on Steve Jobs and he just has the ick. That's the best way to describe. He’s like trying to be a good sport and smile and be like, yeah, but he has the ick.

David: It is unbelievable to watch this knowing everything that would happen over the next 10, 15 years.

Ben: This incredibly close collaboration. There are two apps that launch in the very first version of the iPhone. Remember it didn’t have an app store, it was not open to third party developers. There is a YouTube app and a Maps app, both of which are Google services now. The apps are written by Apple. The icons are designed by Apple. They’re basically just consuming Google’s data as APIs.

David: The only icons and apps on the phone are the ones that Apple puts there. Two of the, I don’t know how many there were, 10, 12, 13 apps are Google apps. It’s wild by the way, the YouTube icon with the wood green tv, so awesome.

Ben: So awesome. I heard the YouTube team absolutely detested it.

David: They hated it. Yeah, they hated it. Well because it wasn’t the YouTube logo and so they, they knew already. It was obvious this was not going to work because The YouTube team is like, apple didn’t put our logo on there. Of course they’re going to start bringing in other video content over time.

Ben: It was a little bit pre algorithm but it was the thinking was there, of we have to make YouTube a destination and then control the experience when they’re in. Making the app icon reminiscent of an old school CRT TV was also just like deeply antithetical to YouTube inventing the video of tomorrow.

David: Yes. Yes. It still looked great though.

Ben: It fit in with that first iPhone for sure.

David: It totally did. Do you know who was the leader of the Google Mobile teams that developed the backends for these apps? Vic Gundotra.

Ben: Really?

David: Yes. That was his first job I think within Google, first or second job within Google. Vic is going to come back up here in a minute. The iPhone keynote, truly world changing historic event. The Android team of course is watching this and that whole sooner prototype thing right in the trash the next day right in the trash can directly in the trash can. The dream is no longer a dream. It’s happening now.

Ben: Get in kid. You’re the A team now.

David: Yep. Clearly touchscreens are the future of mobile devices

Ben: And a capacitive touchscreen at that.

David: Remember Eric Schmidt is on the Apple Board, once Steve Jobs finds out about what the Android team and Google is now doing, he goes ballistic.

Ben: Or perhaps to use his word thermonuclear.

David: Yes. Full on classic Steve Jobs, supposedly at an Apple all hands meeting, this is actually a little later, but he is overheard and quoted leaked to the press as saying we did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake, Google wants to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.

Ben: Wow, oh man. Which is, to this day fair Apple has been happy to just take a spiff of all the traffic that they send to Google and not compete in Google’s core business.

David: Yep.

Ben: Now I will say I believe Apple reputation launderers a little bit. They get a lot of the value of being in the search business without having to do all the stuff that they demonize from a privacy and data sharing and all that ickiness perspective. But fine whatever it’s doing business.

David: That’s fair. Apple did not enter the search business.

Ben: In Walter Isaacson’s book, Steve Jobs says, I’m going to destroy Android because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.

David: Yes.

Ben: He also says, I will spend my last dying breath if I need to and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank to right this wrong.

David: He was pissed, he was really pissed. Now interestingly, he doesn’t actually kick Eric Schmidt off the board until 2009.

Ben: It’s interesting.

David: I think it took Steve a little while to realize what the dream was within Google.

Ben: And there’s also a reasonable argument back. Look, both companies took stuff from each other. A lot of the stuff that apple touts that they were the first company to ever do Multitouch and they own the, there were predecessor companies that did Multitouch before them too. The iPhone debuted a lot of technologies for the first time. A lot of them were also just at the right time in history. I think Android arrived at a lot of similar conclusions at the same time.

David: True. It’s interesting you said Multitouch. Multitouch actually becomes the battleground.

Ben: Because that’s the patent that they go to war over.

David: That’s the patents that Apple has. Steve Jobs threatens to sue Google over implementation of Multitouch gestures. As a result, Android for several years doesn’t have things like pinch to zoom or the swipe operating system, UI navigation gestures. I’m pretty sure if you remember early Android phones for the first couple of years, every single one of them had four physical buttons. At the bottom of the phone to navigate the operating system. I think this is why.

Ben:  But let’s take the Google side of this argument for a minute. When Android does launch, they have the market, which today is the play store. Apple didn’t have an app store. Android had, when you swipe down a notification center with all the notifications from each of your individual apps,

David: Took Apple years to get that

Ben: You could drag to rearrange apps on the home screen. These are things that Apple then directly copied as well, so. Great artists steal.

David: Exactly. Let’s get into the launch of the competition. November, 2007, so what’s that, 10 months after the iPhone reveal and five months after the launch, remember Android launches in 2008, Google announces the formation of the Open Handset Alliance.

Ben: That’s right.

David: And this is a partnership with HTC, Motorola, Samsung, LG, T-Mobile, Sprint, Qualcomm, Intel, Broadcom and Texas Instruments. This was so confusing at the time I and everybody else was like.

Ben: What does it mean?

David: What is this? Is Google making a phone? Is Google not making a phone? Then a whole year goes by with basically nothing. Then in September of 2008, a lot of things happened in September of 2008, Chrome, Android, Lehman Brothers, Google announces the T-Mobile G1 phone, the G phone, and the T-Mobile G one is manufactured by HTC. Remember Andy and Android’s original partner in the prototype and the product name the HTC product name for it is the HTC Dream. This is the dream. This was what they were working on in the US it’s called the G1. It actually is a super interesting little device.

Ben: I wrote an app in it. I had a class in college, it was like a capstone class or something where I could like pick my own project to do. We had a four person team and one of the guys had a T-Mobile G1 and we wrote, I think it was like a Java thing for it. But he then founded the company Daily Booth after that.

David: Wow. Yeah.

Ben: In fact it may have even been like a daily booth for Android app.

David: You had a lot of founders come out of your crew at Ohio State, awesome. It has a touch screen on the front with the physical navigation buttons like I was talking about. It has a slide out horizontal query keyboard reminiscent of the sidekick back in the days. Unlike the iPhone, it has multitasking, you can run multiple apps at once and it has third party applications. Now that’s a little bit unfair to the iPhone because by the time the G1 actually launched, Apple had indeed just shipped the app store. The event where they launched it is like T-Mobile event in New York City in a commercial kitchen. It’s a haphazard random launch. You can’t even find video of it today. There are little clips you can find and still images, what is widely reported. You can actually see in photos, Larry and Sergey do show up. They roller blade into the building. They roller blade on stage. There are all these T-Mobile and HTC executives there in suits. Here come Larry and Serge on roller blades, on stage.

Ben: Listeners join the Acquired email list. We’ll throw this in the next email that goes out.

David: It was haphazard to say the least. But the G1 slash Dream becomes a pretty decent success. It sells over a million units in the US and just this one device, this one phone gets 6% smartphone market share, which puts it roughly on par with Palm like all of Palm. The G1 matches in market share, but the smartphone market is still very small.

Ben: It’s important to remember mobile really wasn’t a thing until 2011 of very obviously the next wave and the next computing paradigm.

David: But to be fair to Apple and the iPhone, it is starting to run away with the market. This is to the point of man, if Google had not bought Android when it had, it would’ve been too late. The whole lifetime of the G one, they sell about a million units. The iPhone sold 11 million units in 2008 alone, 20 million in 2009. Basically overnight Apple and the iPhone goes from not in the smartphone market at all to over 50% market share of smartphones. But as great as the iPhone was, it did have a few weaknesses.

Ben: No copy paste.

David: No copy paste.

Ben: Yep. No multitasking

David: As mentioned before, it didn’t multitask. Not very customizable. I think we’re still in the era of, you can’t even change your wallpaper on the iPhone. Pretty sure we are. I think it’s still just the black background.

Ben: Yep. You can’t put your own apps on it from anywhere but the app store even after it launches.

David: A big knock at the time. People love that. It’s a touch screen. People really wanted the physical keyboards. The biggest problem with the iPhone, at least in the US, you can only get it on AT&T.

Ben: And you could only get it with the Edge network. It was unusable.

David: That’s right. It didn’t have 3G,

Ben: It was so terrible, eventually the iPhone 3G came out within a year. But even that was really slow. The network had not caught up to what you wish the device could do for a few years.

David: Yeah, that brings us to holiday 2009 and the Motorola droid.

Ben: Changed everything.

David: It’s funny to say now, like oh the Motorola, like the Motorola droid, this changed everything. Yes, when we interviewed Steve Bomber a couple of months ago, he brought it up when the droid launched it was holiday 2009. I think you and I were like, was it really that late? Wasn’t it early? And he was like, Nope, Christmas 2009, I will never forget it. That is when Android won the market. This was the moment.

Ben: Google was really willing to put their brand second. Now were they really putting their brand second? It’s Android versus Droid, very convenient. But like if you were to go survey the American public in 2009, 10, 11, 12, maybe even 13 and say, do you know about Android, the mobile operating system? No, do you know about Droid? I have a Droid phone.

David: Well, and then there were a couple of years after that where I was like, do you know about Google and Android? Yeah. Maybe. Do you know about Samsung and Galaxy? Oh yeah, I know about that.

Ben:Yep, exactly.

David: So we’ll get into that in a sec. The droid.

Ben: Droid does, baby.

David: Verizon at this point is getting pummeled by at and t. It’s been two years since the iPhone launch. AT&T isn’t just stealing a lot of subscribers from Verizon because of the iPhone. They’re stealing the best subscribers, the people that are willing to pay the most money for the biggest price data plans for smartphones. Verizon finally decides like, we got to change the game here. We got to be able to compete with the iPhone. We’re going to go all in on Android. We are going to buy a device and make this our flagship smartphone, position it against the iPhone and we are going to invest hugely behind this thing.

The device itself, the actual droid made by Motorola, was a great device. It had a big screen, big screen for the time, a slide out keyboard. It had a five megapixel camera, removable battery, all of these things. The iPhone didn’t have. Probably the most important feature it had though the killer, killer app was on the software side. It was the first Android device launched with Google Maps, turn by turn navigation.

Ben: I didn’t realize that.

David: Before the droid, there was this whole consumer electronics product category of dedicated GPS devices. People old enough to remember, might remember this. Tom Toms nav Techs people would buy Garmin, these devices. They would put them in their cars, you also paid a monthly subscription fee for the service of the turn by turn navigation. Overnight this entire product category gets obsoleted, sherlocked, gone. Because Google Maps is a better product with better navigation and it’s free, no more monthly fees just baked in in your phone and the device you already have with you. Why on earth would anybody buy, let alone pay monthly for a standalone GPS product again?

Ben: Yep.

David: You know what doesn’t have it? The iPhone, the Apple version of Google Maps, you had to manually advance the steps so it would pull up the route. Then you could tap the button to be like, I have made this turn now show me the next part of it.

Ben: You’re exactly right. I remember that too.

David: Not really what you want to do while you’re driving, man. It’s crazy how not that long ago this was, that was the killer feature. But even more important than other features was the marketing and the muscle that Verizon put behind this. They licensed the droid name from Lucasfilm.

Ben:  That’s right. I think Lucasfilm was mentioned at the bottom in the credits of every commercial.

David: Yes, every commercial. They did these series of commercials that we’ve been referencing. Man, if you lived in the US and you are older than like 12 at this time, this is burned in your memory. It was so great. The first 80% of the ad, 90% of the ad was a Apple style ad knockoff with the like bright, happy, upbeat music and the white background. It had the fading apple style text and it said, I don’t multitask, I don’t have a removable battery, et cetera, et cetera. Then the very last five seconds of the ad, there was like a hard cut and like static noise and it was black and it was edgy and then it said Droid does.

It was so good, the CMO of Verizon. Verizon did all of this, said that the campaign was designed to quote ‘wake up the market’ and boy did it ever. That original droid, I think it sold a quarter million units the first weekend it was on sale and then it sold a million units faster than the original iPhone had. Like there was just so much pent up demand for a real smartphone on the Verizon network. Plus all this has turn by turn navigation is, but even to put aside whether it was better or not, it just was a real smartphone on Verizon, Time Magazine named the Droid its product of the year for 2009.

Ben: Wow.

David: The bigger thing though is that like Verizon going all in behind it, even though they would add the iPhone later, it creates this seed of what the Android user base would become today, at least in America. Because Verizon went all in on Android, all in on Droid over the next couple of years. They followed the original droid up with, let’s see, there was the HTC Droid incredible, the Droid X, the Droid Two, the Droid Bionic, the Droid Max, all of these had major marketing campaigns behind it.

Ben: Game over for the segment of the market that is not Apple. This different OEM from operating system. Google just runs away with it. Before this, Microsoft had a shot.

David: They really did.

Ben: They were a systemic disadvantage because they were going to carriers and saying, why don’t you pay us $5, $10? And Google was going to them and saying, here you go. This is free, you can have the source code and you can modify it as you see fit. Even today, I think Samsung has their own OS, Samsung one or something like that, that looks different. It’s Android, but it’s the open source version of Android that they’ve customized. That’s the thing that’s on, I don’t know, a billion phones and three, we aren’t Microsoft.

David: Yeah, you guys don’t want to be compact.

Ben: Right. Microsoft managed to suck up all the profit in that entire value chain and handset makers, you currently make money, so why would you go work with Microsoft who did that to the PC makers? And then as a little sweetener on top of all this, you know how I mentioned it was free in open source,

David: It’s actually less than free.

Ben: We’re actually going to pay you.

David: Yeah.

Ben: For searches that originate on your phone, we will give a little rev share to both the carrier and the OEM, the handset maker.

David: Yep. This was not widely publicized at the time, as you can imagine, but Bill Gurley wrote a blog post where he had heard from friends that Google was paying carriers and OEMs to use Android, even though Android was free. He wrote this incredible blog post about it called The Less Than Free Business Model. He basically predicted that Android's going to run away with this here. If you’re a carrier or an OEM, sure there’s a segment of the market that’s going to demand Apple, that’s fine, but Microsoft is dead, Palm is dead, Blackberry is dead. There’s no way you can compete with free, let alone less than free, where they are paying you to take something of value for free.

Ben: And from Google’s side, it’s the exact same thing as that thing we talked about with Opensourcing Chromium, they’re happy to give a few percentage points in traffic acquisition costs of their search revenue to people who are insuring that the platform underneath them doesn’t belong to someone else. There were some risks that it was all Apple. Then that creates two problems for Google. One, they pay Apple a lot more money than they pay the combination of the carrier and the OEM maker those get a much smaller spiff.

Two, this means that Google controls more of the underlying environment that they operate in. Imagine how terrible it would be for them if Mobile Safari was the new internet explorer and their entire franchise was at risk of Apple saying, and we’re going to point traffic over here. Now Google is happy to toss a couple of points over to these guys.

David: I can’t think of another example of a dominant technology business and business model that has successfully survived and transitioned a major platform shift and thrived in that next platform as well. Mobile was a platform shift, a huge one. Going from PC to the web was a platform shift. Going from PC, web, to mobile was an even bigger platform shift.

Ben: Play it out even back further in history than this. IBM was dominant in mainframes and then lost their dominance in the PC era. Microsoft was dominant in PCs and then lost their dominance in the web era. Google was dominant on the web and stayed dominant in the mobile era. They didn’t derive giant profits from the mobile, like directly off of selling phones or selling the OS or they make somebody on the play store, but not giant amounts relative to the rest of their money than what other players like Apple make.

David: But they kept search going

Ben: They managed to stay relevant to consumers with these hundreds of millions, billions of devices that they shipped and their business was doing better than ever.

David: All of these Android phones that are shipping, especially in the earlier years, what is the most prominent part of the UI on the touchscreen giant freaking Google search bar right there at the top.

Ben: Right? The state of play of being a big tech company and this dates back 80 years, is technology moves fast and the new paradigms disrupt everyone that came before you. You get one era and you got to make the absolute most of the one era that you grew up in. After that you’re probably going to lose relevance. You might keep your money machine going for a long time. Famously, IBM made more revenue than Microsoft for a lot longer than people think.

David: Or even take Microsoft and Windows. Like Windows is still big today.

Ben: Yep, but the importance of that platform is going to fade and fade and fade.

David: You won’t be able to transition your business model right to the next era. Google did it.

Ben: And occasionally someone misses the second era but comes back for the third. Like Apple figured out mobile, they never won a previous era. They were a player in PCs but they didn’t win. Almost no one gets two and almost no one gets two successive ones. That is the really impressive thing that Google figured out how to do here.

David: Yeah, guess like we said, this episode is the hit parade. Android basically from end of 2009 onward just washes over the world like a tidal wave. In holiday 2009 when the droid comes out, total Android market share of the smartphone market is still in the G1 range. Like five 6% global market share. One year later, 30%.

Ben: Wow.

David: They go from 5% to 30% in one year. They announced that over 200,000 Android devices are shipping every day around the world. The next year in 2011, Android’s market share is 50% and two years after that, by the end of 2013, it is 80% market share.

Ben: In many ways it’s the visa network of networks thing where they don’t have to make every phone, they don’t have just one horse in the race. They’re getting leverage by having 2, 3, 4, 5 major manufacturers of these devices that are all independently doing their own marketing. There's a very clever arrangement where you can just have the Android open source project and you can build your own mobile phone and you can launch it and you don’t have our app store and you don’t have to default to Google search and you don’t get Google Map. Like you just have the operating system and it’s great. Anyone could do that, but why wouldn’t you want to have our app store? It’s where all, all the apps are. If you do that, then you get all the great Google services, all the apps you get the native Gmail and the native maps and all this great stuff we’ve written. If you do that, then Google’s the default search and we’ll pay you for that.

David: And then you make money.

Ben: But by the way, if you want all this stuff that you consumers are going to demand, you are going to default to Google search.

David: That’s the payment. That’s the offer you can’t refuse. Now here’s the actual crazy thing. As I said by 2013, Android global market share is 80%. That’s actually higher than it is today. Today it’s down to like, I think 72% and Apple is 27.999%.

Ben: Apple’s share has really grown.

David: No question, Android pushed iPhone to be better on many dimensions. Things like cheaper iPhones, bigger screens, better cameras, on and on and on and on of things. I don’t think Apple would’ve done if Android hadn’t been pushing them.

Ben: Probably not big cheap screens, but some of the cameras. I think so.

David: Maybe, I don’t know. For years the iPhones did not have good cameras. Big part of that droid marketing push was the five megapixel camera. The original few iPhones had a two megapixel camera. I think it was crappy.

Ben: Yeah, they’ve definitely pushed each other.

David: Yeah. Then the other quick thing to mention on Android history, there was one interesting moment in tension with Samsung in the early to mid 2010s. Samsung basically said, oh, okay, the iPhone is the premium device. Android is this incredibly flexible platform. What if we just take Android and copy the iPhone with Android? And they got really good at it. The Galaxy devices were just shipping in huge, huge numbers. Then Samsung started stripping out Google services and putting their own Samsung services in on some of their devices. That was a bridge too far for Google.

This is when Google started the Pixel program. Google had done the Nexus program making their own hardware before the Pixel though was and is a reference device that yeah, consumers could buy. But more so to show the rest of the OEM market, the non Samsung market, Hey here are reference designs essentially for great premium devices, great cameras, all the features you want here, copy these. It’s the same thing as the Microsoft Surface strategy. Why Bomber was so adamant, we got to make a surface, we got to show the OEMs how to do this.

Ben: Right? It’s funny. I have been trying to think about what is the business of Android. Google having Android versus Google not having Android. I tried to pull up the most credible numbers I possibly could. There are basically two things that you just have to add together to create the value. One is how much money they make from the play store, which has become significant, didn’t used to be but is now. The second is how much money are they saving by not having the searches originate from a platform that they don’t own.

I used to think, oh, because it’s Android, they don’t have to pay money, they have to pay $20 billion to Apple. It’s not zero, they do actually have to pay. Like we talked about, David and I figured out as we were going through the financial disclosures and stuff, they do pay the OEMs and they do pay the carriers.

The question is how much? Because once you can figure out how much, then you can do a little bit of napkin math to figure out, okay, well how much are they still saving by it not being Apple? Google paid out last year, and I’m just using the current numbers to try to figure out what the splits have always been. They paid out last year $55 billion in total traffic acquisition costs. Now traffic acquisition costs are actually the sum of two different numbers from two different businesses because they love to obfuscate things.

One, it’s what we’re actually looking for, the acquisition of traffic to Google search. The other component is money that we paid to publishers where our ads show up in the double click AdSense world.

David: Yep.

Ben:  Now we know that that average is about a 70-30 split and we know that they made $30 billion last year gross in the Google network. You could say, okay, they probably paid out about $21 billion of that 55 billion in the AdSense double click Google Network world. That backs our 55 billion down to 34 billion. Okay, that’s 34 billion in actual traffic acquisition for Google search.

David: And we know 20 was iPhone,

Ben: Right. For Safari searches, that means there are 14 billion that gets distributed to non Apple traffic acquisition distribution partners, which in their annual report they define as browser providers, mobile carriers, original equipment manufacturers, and software developers. It’s basically 14 billion to the Android mobile carriers and OEMs plus Firefox.

David: Yep.

Ben: What am I missing? I’m going to guess Firefox is less than a billion. Call it somewhere around half a billion ish.

David: Yeah, there’s probably some version of the old portal deals that still exist, properties on the web that have Google search baked into it.

Ben: Okay, let’s cut 4 billion off for Firefox and the other web properties and other.

David: Okay. 10 billion going to the carriers and OEMs.

Ben: It’s actually pretty significant that 10 billion going to carriers and OEMs, it’s half of what they’re paying Apple,

David: Half of what they’re paying Apple, but for many, many, many more devices.

Ben: Right, clearly the rev share to the carriers and OEMs is a much smaller percent than what they have to pay Apple, I’d guess a quarter. Either way, I actually think after walking all the way through it, the bigger component of this is just de-risking their future. It’s not how many billions, they don’t care about giving 10 billion up for this.

David: As we’ve been saying all episode, Google is more than happy to pay traffic acquisition costs to any and everyone.

Ben: Then direct value that they make from the PlayStore, it actually came out in a lawsuit. In 2019, PlayStore revenue was 11.2 billion, then gross profit was 8.5 billion and 7 billion in operating income. Now 7 billion, not nothing, but still a far cry from Google’s core business of ads from search Gmail and Maps. That same year the core business did almost 100 billion in revenue. Something like 85 billion in gross profit is my best estimate. around 30 ish billion in operating income. Even though the PlayStore made 7 billion in 2019, the important thing is that Android is still primarily protecting the core search ads business and making sure that traffic doesn’t go elsewhere.

David: This levered Google’s web business into the mobile era, how amazing is that?

Ben: Yeah, that’s true. It probably generated several hundred billion dollars, profit dollars that they may not have had those years otherwise.

David: Yep.

Ben: So I guess what I’m saying is obviously Android was a giant success and the biggest reason, even though they save, I don’t know, 10, 15 billion a year from not having to pay it to Apple. Even though they generate 8 billion, I’m sure at this point it’s bigger. I don’t know, 10, 15 billion a year. Really it’s about just protecting the core, not about saving costs.

David: And this one, they almost missed it. They hadn’t bought Android when they had like that window was closing fast.

Ben: And Microsoft did miss it.

David: Fast, fast, fast. Yep.

Ben:  At some point, Andy Rubin leaves and Sundar actually takes over the combined teams. Our hero here, who is starting to gather more responsibilities, was just the application clients and then it was Chrome and in 2013 it becomes Chrome and Android. Whenever you see Sundar on stage, he is very proud of Google’s two open platforms. Today there are more than 3 billion active Android devices. I think it’s even higher than that now.

David: It was just silly. There are like 7 billion people in the world. They’re active over 3 billion active Android phones.

Ben: You’re probably thinking coming into this 2010, 2011 era, they’re really feeling themselves over there at Google. We've jumped over some failures, but it’s been hit after hit after hit in a lot of these areas that really matter. Just like we talked about on the Microsoft episodes, it really doesn’t matter when you fail and how many times you fail, even the size of your failures, if your hits are these giant world changing platform type tech businesses that endure for decades and that’s what they had on their hands.

David: And it sure looked at this time like there was another big technology category out there,

Ben: Of social

David: That Google should be playing in of a similar size called social.

Ben: Yes.

David: And this is the Google Plus story. I’d say rest in peace, but I don’t think anybody misses it.

Ben: All right. Well I want to start this story the way that people expect us to start this story.  I have a little bit of a different take on it as we get partway in.

David: Great.

Ben: Google had been interested in social for a long time. They weren’t blind blind to it in 2007, they tried to do open social and they basically failed at that because Facebook didn’t participate and Facebook was social. Everything else combined didn’t really matter.

David: You didn’t start where I thought you were going to start. The craziest thing is that Google had Facebook before Facebook, Orkut.

Ben: Yeah, that’s true. Which I think was like a 20% time project then blew up in Brazil.

David: Totally. There was a Turkish engineer who worked for Google named  Orkut Büyükkökten, and his passion was social networking. Friendster was a thing at the time, January, 2004, before Gmail, before the Google IPO, before Facebook launches on the Harvard campus, in his 20% time, he launches a social network within Google called Orkut. It didn’t become that big in America, but it got at its peak, I think 300 million users. It was the biggest social network in Brazil, the biggest social network in India.  Google was like, eh, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem that important.

Ben: Open Social Event in 2007, Google Wave in 2009. By the way, can we just pause and say 2009, this is like right after Chrome, right after Android. Google is a big place and Google is a siloed place at this point. It's crazy that Android is happening over in this other building and there’s this fight with Apple and that’s the same time that they’re doing Google Wave. It’s weird that this is all concurrent. The company was focused in a lot of different directions.

David: But it was so decentralized, it actually worked well.

Ben: It worked early. It worked really well to get all this stuff off the ground.

David: It was so interesting doing the research for this episode because so many of the people we talked to, even people who were leaders of a lot of these products, because Google was so decentralized and so siloed, they were focused on their thing on Android or Chrome, whatever. We'd ask what was the overall strategy? What was the through line to all of this? And we kept getting answers like, well it was just googly. People worked on what they thought was cool and it was good for the web. That is absolutely true. But there was this all overlay of this very, very thin layer of strategy that held the whole web together.

Ben: I think that the strategy was pretty tight at the top level and they just didn’t actually need to communicate it down very far. Most people that I talked to said, I don’t know, I was just trying to build great products that people love.

David: Right. I think it was a feature, not a bug. Is what I’m saying, that it didn’t communicate down because it let the teams below build really, really great products.

Ben: Yep, never really think about how is this going to help the ads business? And that was okay. Wave failed because really nobody knew what to use it for despite a dazzling and wonderful first introductory video buzz. Then in 2010 that created this big privacy debacle right at launch. It was super short-lived that shut down. Then in 2010, Urs Hölzle, very senior Google at this point, probably distinguished engineer, senior vice president.

David: The guy who created the distributed infrastructure.

Ben: Right after the buzz failure, he is inspired to write this memo, like the Bill Gates 1995 internet memo. There’s a sea change going on. The internet is becoming more people oriented. Social media could be a problem for us. The social media challenge requires a decisive and substantial response involving a significant deployment of personnel right away. Essentially the internet was now starting to organize around people in this web 2.0 era, not just pages and applications with the things that were the domain of Google.

Here's why I want to pause David, and I’m going to take it in a little bit different direction than I think you’re probably expecting, which is so therefore they went after Facebook. I think it’s a little bit more related to the palace intrigue at Google and a little bit less on the nail strategic. If you zoom out and look at the company right now, it’s pretty fragmented. It’s got different fiefdoms with big personalities at the top of each of these fiefdoms, Android, Chrome. Search, YouTube developer relations, trying to will a Google platform into existence. Different products with competing goals. Ultimately they all help Google’s overarching mission, but there are a lot of elbows starting to come out.

Android was its own fiefdom, totally off on its own island, fighting an existential battle. Chrome is starting to do the same stuff as Android. They’re building their own operating system. It’s not clear what belongs in an Android camp versus a Chrome camp. Sundar hasn’t unified them yet. Search, very protected separate team, especially the core people doing search ranking and monetization. No one touches them. YouTube is totally separate. Gmail is massive and it really is the only one in 2009-10 at the company that owns identity.

Since it’s the only Google property that you actually have to log into. YouTube has its own entirely different username and password system. It’s a mess, right? It’s a complete mess. Larry’s sensing this, he’s not CEO at the time, but he is realizing the company’s all over the place. He decides he’s just going to come back and get the company on track. I think Google Plus is just the thing he picked as the single thing to try to galvanize and unify the company around. No matter what they picked and how they executed it, it was going to create a lot of carnage.

David: I can buy that.

Ben: There was a big shift that needed to happen in one way, shape, or form. Google Plus ended up being the ugly thing they did.

David: Yeah. A recentralizing of authority, so to speak, within the company.

Ben: Right, in May, 2010, they get the top 50 people at Google’s leadership assembled to discuss what to do.

David:  The argument for this is this is more of a convenient crisis model.

Ben: It might be a real crisis also, but it’s also exactly what you’re saying, David. Officially then in January, 2011, Google announces Larry Page will return as CEO in a few months. That April right away Larry moves his office into what would become the Google Plus building.

David: Wow.

Ben: Yep, they had just come out of this chapter, they’ve got this amazing business. The whole Chrome and Bing thing was defense against Microsoft. Android was defense against Apple and Microsoft and Google Plus is now defense against Facebook. Legitimately, you could imagine a world where social ends up becoming way more important and the only places to put ads and the places where people are asking for information. There was rumors for a long time Facebook was going to build a search engine. You have the attention, you can hijack it and do other stuff with it.

David: These were walled gardens, Facebook was a walled garden. Google search couldn't index what happened inside of Facebook. You could see how this is an existential threat. You said like the traffic is growing like oh my gosh, what if this becomes AOL all over again?

Ben: Right. That's the main thing. One tier down from that is Facebook doesn’t even allow other ad servers.

David: At least with AOL, we could do a deal with them and power their monetization. Facebook just hired Sheryl Sandberg. They’re doing this themselves.

Ben: They’re doing it all in house. Closed loop system.  Google plus, what was Google Plus and how did it get built? It was a one year sprint following this point, the 50 getting together. It was built in a very, very un googly way. It was not organic David, like these passion projects you’re talking about.

David: It was instilled from on high down upon all of the products.

Ben: It was not based on a core technical insight, it was not consensus driven, it was top down command and control style led by the person that you mentioned earlier, Vic Gundotra. Now who was Vic Gundotra.

David: Vic was this interesting character. Like we said earlier, he had been leading Google’s developer efforts in the pre-Android days.

Ben: And he was the front man. He was the mc at Google IO.

David: If you were looking for somebody to communicate and push down this new top down vision across the company, he would be a logical choice.

Ben: Yes. I don’t know if he raised his hand. I don’t know if Larry said, hey, I really think you should do this on our behalf. But what is definitely true is it became Vic’s thing and Eric and Larry and Sergey step back and let Vic run with it. He was given an enormous amount of institutional authority.

David: We should say too, you alluded to this earlier, what was Google Plus? It wasn’t just a social product in and of itself. It was baked into all of Google. It was inserted into every other product that Google had. There’s a quote from Vic to the press at the time about this, about what Google Plus is. He says, this is the next generation of Google. It is Google plus one.

Ben: There are a lot of these really.

David: Corny. I’m crazy even saying that, gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Ben: It was a Facebook style thing, but its goal, in addition to being a Facebook style thing, was to leverage all of Google’s assets and make all Google things, Google plus things. They moved big headcounts out of each team and onto the Google Plus team. They reached deep to integrate with these other products. It's very clear who the boss was. In all these negotiations, you had a clear mandate, like your job this half year, this year is do these Google plus integrations?

David:  Your OKR. Google famously ran on OKRs, was now all about plus, pluses.

Ben: Danny Crichton, who would go on to become the managing editor at TechCrunch at this point in time, was a Google intern. He wrote about it later and he said, due to this integration, much of it was forced. The culture around the company at Google had become deeply poisonous by the time I started, I still remember talking to one member of the Picasa team who was a Google’s photo repository that they bought, who told me to F off when I asked about integrating Google Plus into the product. He was hardly the only one. Company-Wide bonuses were based on the success of Google Plus, they even went so far as to put little plus one buttons on mobile advertisements. Like those little banner ads at the bottom.

David: Yes. This is the best Google had bought AdMob. Yes. the mobile display ad units.

Ben: You could plus one it, who the hell wants to plus one an ad. This is like Facebook’s like button, but Google Plus’s version and they’re like, any Google thing should be plus oneable. They even reached into YouTube comments and YouTube comments became Google plus posts, they almost killed the golden goose.

David: Right? They almost killed all of these golden gooses that they had.

Ben: Yes and so Google Plus from a product perspective, it wasn’t just Facebook. They brought a lot of really interesting ideas. Google Hangouts came out of this. Google Photos came out of this. There were these things called Sparks, they really rethought a lot of social networking. The issue is nobody really wanted to rethink social networking. That was a Google priority to get people to use this. Not a user-driven one, they tried to essentially put rocket fuel onto scale. Something that really didn’t have product market fit.

David: Well, I really think the key huge mistake with Google plus,one of the huge mistakes with Google Plus was.

Ben: You don’t need a Facebook when there’s already Facebook.

David: Not even that Facebook was already dying. Mark Zuckerberg had already realized that the future of social was not what it looked like at this point in time. As Google is launching Google Plus.

Ben: 2011, June, 2011.

David: 2011, 2012, 2013, these were the big years for Google Plus. What is Mark Zuckerberg doing? He’s buying Instagram. He’s buying WhatsApp and he’s remaking essentially Facebook into what meta would become of like, hey, what we used to think of as social networking has bifurcated into two things. Public media, IE YouTube, Instagram, UGC and private messaging. Here's Google.

Ben: Launching, I kid you not, this is the craziest thing, Desktop first. With a desktop only UI to arrange your friends into circles.

David: Circles. That’s right. Circles.

Ben:  Which is on its own. It’s such a computer science way of thinking about it. Oh, my friends are in sometimes overlapping, sometimes not overlapping groups that I want to carefully label so that I can identify deterministically who I want to share what with.

David: Right. Nobody wants to do that. Here’s the thing that just leapt out to me about Google Plus. This was Google’s Windows Longhorn/Windows Vista. In our Microsoft saga, we talked about how Vista/Longhorn was the most damaging thing to the company because of the distraction and the siphoning of resources and the best talent away from working on what really mattered. Now the question I was asking myself and others in research of, okay, what were the negative consequences of that? With Microsoft, it was clear Google who was the negative consequence. The whole reason Microsoft let Google fester from their perspective for all these years and didn’t kneecap them was they were tied up with all the distraction from Vista.

Ben: And losing relevance with developers because they keep selling them a platform that kept not shipping. Then when it eventually did ship, it wasn’t good.

David:  I started trying to figure out like, okay, what are the similar consequences for Google of the Plus era? And at first I couldn’t really think of anything. I was like, oh well Android’s pretty good. YouTube’s pretty good, Chrome’s pretty good. Search is still pretty good. Gemini, AI comes out later, it’s all pretty good. But there are two things.

Ben: Messaging probably I bet in a Nonplus world, WhatsApp, something like that could be owned by Google.

David: Two things. One is messaging. Totally missed messaging. When I was a business school student at Stanford, Eric was now executive chairman and he started co-teaching a class at GSP. I took his class. I was one of his students during these years. It was awesome. It was one of the best classes I ever took. The quarter when I was taking the class was when Facebook bought WhatsApp. I remember Eric coming into class right after it happened and just being like, God, we missed it. We totally missed it. That’s because Google was distracted, that was one thing.

Then I realized the other as bigger or bigger thing is cloud Google should have been massively investing in cloud. There are all sorts of reasons that they didn’t, we’re going to save this for the next episode. But I was like, yeah, especially think about where the impetus for this came from, from  [inaudible 03:30:20] from this memo. The [inaudible 03:30:22] memo, as it’s known [inaudible 03:30:24] should have been focused on Cloud. He should not have been focused on social. Google had the wrong strategy in Cloud for many years and as a result, that’s why their Cloud business is way behind Amazon and Microsoft.

Ben: And maybe they turned some talent, maybe there was some good people that got burned by the culture souring. You could argue this destroyed product velocity. People complain today that Google’s always working on really interesting technology and they just never get cool products out the door.

David: That is by far the biggest complaint. You hear about Google from.

Ben: Slow and big and bureaucratic.

David: Yep. Folks on the inside and outside these days is just too slow and yeah. That’s probably the biggest negative consequences.

Ben: Maybe you could trace that here.

David: I bet you can because think about it before this. We just be this whole episode talking about all these amazing things they were building and shipping and acquiring and transforming.

Ben: Until Gemini, I actually don’t know where Gemini Stacks, is it a third place product?

David: Still a question mark.

Ben: Until Gemini. What great breakthrough consumer service did they launch after Google Plus?

David: I got nothing.

Ben: That’s pretty wild.

David: After having this incredible 10 year run

Ben: And there was a lot of stuff they tried. I think some things for Android users, think about Google now that predated Google Assistant, maybe Google Home.

David: These are not world changing products.

Ben: It’s funny, the thing that I keep thinking about from the Google plus failure is this big existential Facebook threat they were worried about, there was a strategy memo in 2013 where Neal Mohan said there is a risk that Facebook becomes the starting point of the Internet. Google knew social was the future and tried to win it, but interestingly they didn’t and they’ve been fine.

David: Right. It was all totally fine.

Ben: And Facebook was really freaked out too that Google was going to come in and win it. Google was like this giant and Facebook was recently public, going through their own problems. Even though it was like a nothing burger and Google Plus was a footnote in history. Both companies were completely all in on this big battle. Ultimately Google wasn’t a credible threat to Facebook.

David: Facebook went in a different direction anyway.

Ben: Facebook went in a different direction. It's almost like the end of Burn After Reading. Have you ever seen that movie?

David: No.

Ben: I won’t spoil anything. But the feeling you have at the end is you just watched all this crazy stuff happen and you’re like, whoa, wait, did any of that matter? That’s how Google Plus feels to me. Google Plus did have two great surviving products Hangouts, which became Meet and Photos.

David: Yep. Photos is a billion user product today.

Ben: Huge. The biggest thing and I think this is like getting back to my original postulate of Never Waste a Crisis. You know what we have today, Google accounts.

David: Hmm, yep.

Ben: You know what Google is today? It’s one company. It’s not these little fiefdoms here and there of different people amassing power and building things in different ways. I’m sure there’s still plenty of that. Everything about Google got more unified from this era. They have a failed product and a smoking crater to show for it. But a unified look across all their products, a unified login that would I think be pretty important for them going forward.

Anyway, my snarky finish on all this is, it’s tempting to say Google lost in social because Google Plus was this giant smoking crater. But actually all of social ended up pivoting to either look like messaging or like YouTube, anyway. YouTube is the winning paradigm in “social media and UGC media”. They should have just done nothing and just watch the money printer go burr.

David: Yep. To put a bow on it Vic ends up leaving the company in 2014. In 2019 they finally shut Google Plus down. There’s a blog post about it, they cite a big security breach as the reason like, oh no, we’ve discovered there’s this huge security vulnerability, thus we need to shut down all of Google Plus.

Ben: Dude, it’s so bad. There’s been 50 Google products that all sound the same. They launched this one called Currents at one point and when they shut Google Plus down, this is horrible. Many people wrote like articles as posts on Google Plus and they’re just gone.

David: Yeah, that’s right. Actually, it was an impediment to doing some of the research for this episode because these posts are gone.

Ben: If you go to plus.google.com/anything, it just redirects you to Google Currents. However, Google Currents has now been shut down. It is a Google workspace blog post announcing the Currents shutdown. Every time you click any Google Plus link anywhere on the web, you go to a blog post that tells you about the shutdown of Currents. That's the most googly thing. They got to do a better job with those. It’s our last section, the bridge to Alphabet.

David: It’s clear it’s time for a new era at Google. The company announces that it is reinventing itself, is becoming an entirely different company. Google is becoming Alphabet in August of 2015. Larry Page will be the CEO of this new Alphabet holding company. Sundar Pichai will be the CEO of Google, which will be by far the largest and really primary operating company within Alphabet. Interestingly, they didn’t at all decide to split up YouTube or any of the various. They just spent all these years unifying it all. That’s all Google.

Ben: They broke out Google X.

David: Yes, Google X, they broke out. Waymo is still part of X at this point in time that would later spin out as now part of Alphabet on its own. But the other bets including an Alphabet, really quite clever, the nomenclature here.

Were Nest that they had just acquired Google Fiber, Calico and Verily. They’re two health companies, Google X Lab and then Google Ventures and capital G, the two investing entities that they had. Then really the question is like, okay, well why did they do this? Why did Larry become CEO of Alphabet? Why did Sundar become CEO of Google? I think this had to happen as like a healing after Google Plus, Sundar was a leader who had real cred going back to the early days and with Chrome and with Android, the core great products, two of these core great products, platforms that we’ve talked about the whole episode that have really driven the Google flywheel all along.

Ben: Interestingly, he had never worked in search or ads.

David: Right. But these are the platforms that had shoehorned Google into the mobile era and protected it from its greatest existential threat. Sundar’s personality I think was a way to reunify the company, bring everybody back together.

Ben: Definitely strikes me as a peacemaker among big egos.

David: Yes. That is where we are going to leave Alphabet/Google for the moment. Ben, give us a sense of how big this company had gotten.

Ben: At the end of 15, it’s gotten huge. It’s 75 billion in revenue, 52 billion of that is first party sites. Google websites, AdWords, Gmail maps, 15 billion the smaller part is over in DoubleClick AdSense land. Actually that’s pretty low margin revenue. Again, the Lion’s share in Google websites, YouTube is profitable at this point, their bottom line operating income, Google did about $23 billion in operating income and their other bets at this point lost about three and a half billion. Their other bets are extremely interesting and will be the focus of our next episode. But the big takeaway here, the business was still in 2015 and essentially is still today search ads.

David: Yep, what so strikes me listening to you say those numbers in 2015, they’re huge. But also Google is so much bigger today on these same businesses with this same business model.  There was another five X scaling to go over the next 10 years.

Ben: It’s crazy.

David: Google back then was like 20% the size of Google now and nothing has basically changed when it comes to the business model and products.

Ben: Nothing’s changed since 2002.

David: Right? Well I think this era, well we talked about all the episode, all the hits were stewarding that business.  Through these C changes.

Ben: But nothing has changed about what the core business is. It just turned out that, that seed of an eye that search ads actually scaled to the biggest market in the world.

David:  Just like the last episode with Gmail at the end, I’ve got one little quote, one little teaser for next time. Ben, what if I told you that between 2015 and 2016, this next year, this next 12 months after the Alphabet transition, all of the following people were Google employees, Alex Krizhevsky of Alex Net. Dawn of machine learning AI, his PhD advisor Jeff Hinton, godfather of AI, his collaborator on the Alex net paper, Ilya Sutskever founding scientist of open AI.

Dario Amodei, co-founder with his sister of Anthropic, Andre Carpathy until recently, Chief AI scientist at Tesla. Chris Ola, Noam Shazi, Ian Goodfellow and of course the co-founders of DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. Mustafa runs AI at Microsoft today, Andrew Ang from Stanford,[inaudible: 03:40:46] and oh yeah, in addition to all of those people the authors of the Transformer paper because Google invented the Transformer and published the paper in June of 2017.

Ben: Right. Which is the novel mechanism that all LLMs today from every big foundational model research lab is based on.

David: When I was talking to folks in the research for this episode and AI came up, one of them said I have to remind people when I’m talking to partners out in the ecosystem that the T in chat GPT stands for transformer and that we invented that. Because it is also during this time while Ilya is working at Google, that he poses the question to his research colleagues and the Google brain team that is working on all of this. Gosh, what do you guys think? If we just built one really, really, really big neural network and we set it loose with training data on the entire internet, which by the way of course we can do, can do here at Google because thanks to the combination of the search index, we index the entire internet and all the products that we just talked about on this whole episode. We have all this data and all of this content out there. If we did that, do you think it would learn everything?

Ben: Well, David, that feels like quite the groundwork for the next episode.

David: That feels like a story for next time. But through that lens, there is another way to view everything that happens at Google during this 10 year period we just discussed, which is that they’re just collecting all the access, all the information and all the talent for AI.

Ben: It’s nuts. There’s this whole other world of research who would be the people that would drive the next decade or five decades of change. They basically had them all in one place at one time.

David: They were all employees of Google. I want to end with one more quote this time from Larry Page all the way back in the year 2000. This is Larry talking in the year 2000 artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. If we had the ultimate search engine, it would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted and it would give you the right thing.

That’s obviously artificial intelligence to be able to answer any question basically because almost everything is on the web. We’re nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that. That is basically what we work on. That's tremendously interesting from an intellectual standpoint. We have all this data, if you printed out our index, it would be 70 miles high. Now we have all this computation. We have about 6,000 computers.

Ben: This is 25 years ago.

David: We have enough disc space to store like 100 copies of the whole web. You have a really interesting confluence of a lot of different things, a lot of computation, a lot of data that didn’t used to be available. From an engineering and scientific standpoint, building things that make use of this is a really interesting intellectual exercise. I expect we’ll be working on that for a while, incredible. This is 25 years ago that he said this.

Ben: Amazing.

David: All right.

Ben: Should we do some analysis?

David: Let’s do some analysis.

Ben: All right, let’s do power. For those who are new listeners, power is the section where we analyze which of the seven powers does Google have from Hamilton Helmer framework that enables a business to achieve persistent differential returns or be more profitable than their nearest competitor and do so sustainably. Google is very, very weird to analyze for this because most of the way you think about Google is actually not where the economic transaction is. If you want to analyze the business, it is why are advertisers spending a marginal dollar with Google versus spending it elsewhere? Google has the seven powers that show up in numerous instances all over their business. But I think the interesting way for us to do this analysis, David, is let’s look at each one. Just assume Google has them all and say where is the biggest or a very large example in our mind of where each of them show up.

David: Great. I like that.

Ben: Counter positioning typically doesn’t show up for incumbents for large companies.

David: This is the exception though with Google.

Ben: Right? Where you just look at their new businesses, for example, in this episode talking about Android, they massively counter positioned against Microsoft. The less than free business.

David: Less than free business model. This is the clearest example of counter positioning I think that has ever existed. My competitors require you to pay them. How about I pay you instead?

Ben: And my competitors can’t do that because they don’t have the business model of advertising based on search such that they can justify doing this.

David: Scale economies. Especially as they’re adding all these apps, all these users across all this surface area. Now if you’re an advertiser and you want to reach users across search or display or video, Google is a one-stop shop.

Ben: You don’t have to independently spend operational time and headcount on all these different platforms, you get the one.

David: That’s not even to mention the scale economies on the infrastructure side we talked about last time or like, they show up in every business here. But that’s just one example.

Ben: And the fact that the more advertisers there are and the more users there are, the more profit Google makes because each little individual auction on every individual search finds a maxable price.

David: Yes. Network economies, YouTube, hello. More creators, more viewers, creators make money from having views of their videos.

Ben: Application developers on Android and users on Android. The two-sided network economies there, yes, everywhere. Not to mention in the core business too, in search, more users searching is more valuable to me as an advertiser because I have a deeper pool of people I can advertise to. I can just deploy more dollars on your channel if it’s working.

David: Yep. Switching costs. How about Gmail? I’ve got my last 20 years of email history in Gmail all stored for free.  I’m not switching

Ben: In the core business. There’s not as much switching costs. I suppose there’s a little bit of, oh because I’ve spent a lot of money, the targeting is very good at allocating my spend, but the switching costs in the core business for an advertiser are not as prominent as other powers. I don’t think I continue to spend on Google because it’s hard to switch. I continue to spend on Google because they have all the high intent users for products other than Amazon. That’s one of the two big search boxes in the world where people type in when they want to buy a product. I’m going to advertise there has little to do with switching costs I think.

David: Yep. But for users of Gmail and several of the other products like enormous.

Ben: For users all across the board.  I won’t leave YouTube at this point. The algorithm’s dialed to my interests.

David: That’s a great point of switching costs of the algorithm on YouTube. Branding, I think in the heyday of Google that we’re talking about in this episode when they’re launching all these incredible products, yes these products won because they’re incredible and because they were free. But also like there was such a halo around the company. If there was a new Google product, I would be chomping at the bit to go try it.

Ben: Yeah, that’s super true. I remember I was desperate for Google Wave invites. The product completely failed, but I was completely dazzled by it and I was desperate to get invite and access. The Google name meant something. Still does by the way. Which I think held them back in AI for a while. They know the Google name means something, so they are reticent to throw their name on it until they got shoved off the cliff.

David: Yep. Cornered resource, well certainly heading into the AI era now YouTube, the YouTube catalog you can train on. All the data they have.

Ben: I was about to say their infrastructure, but I think that’s actually a scale economy that they’ve built out the infrastructure they have so they can run all their products as cheaply as they can.

David: Yep. I think the infrastructure is also a process power.

Ben: Yeah.

David: In the era we’ve been talking about, they could launch all these products on their infrastructure just way cheaper than anyone else.

Ben: You know, what’s a coronary resource? They have built internal software and systems that is better than what is available outside of Google.

David: Hmm, great point.

Ben: A lot of the time they even create open source projects that are similar to their internal stuff, but they don’t actually give away the internal stuff inside Google. They still run Borg, they run far less Kubernetes than they run Borg. Borg is part of the secret sauce.

David: Yeah. When you talk to engineers who’ve left Google, they miss the infrastructure.

Ben: So Google has it all.

David: All of them.

Ben: And we can name a lot more examples but we got to go.

David: All right, playbook. All right.

Ben: I tried to get most of them in as we were going in the story. The first is that Google really wanted to become a platform company and I was noodling on did they ever do this successfully? And David, we touched on this idea that they are advancing the platform of the web without owning the platform of the web. If they didn’t have Android, how would you answer the question? Is Google a platform company?

David: Hmm. I’d say it’s like a shadow platform company. It’s like a ecosystem company.

Ben: And even with Android. Okay great. They own the target development platform. Their money is still made elsewhere. It’s not a platform business, they may have a platform orientation as a company. They build a bunch of stuff for developers to build their applications on top of. But where their bread and butter is really, as an advertising company, it’s important when push really comes to shove on big strategic decisions the company has to make. Like Apple, pure play platform company, Microsoft, pure play platform company, they either sell software or hardware and then they need the platform around it to bolster their sales. Google’s very indirect.

David: Yep.

Ben: All right, so that was one. The other one is they make tons of small acquisitions famously. that run in the 2010s, aside from the big ones, from YouTube, from Android, from DoubleClick, from AdMob, there was also what became Google groups, Spreadsheets, Docs, Blogger. They bought applied Semantics with the patents and some of the tech for AdSense. They bought the technology for Google Maps, they bought urchin for Google Analytics, dodgeball, feed burner, recaptcha, slide, [inaudible:03:51:46], like.com, wide vine, add meld, punched, Zagg it, Sparrow, Wave, I could just keep going.

David: Oh yeah. There are hundreds of companies they bought in talking to folks in the research. There was this amazing part of Google culture that also fit the strategy perfectly of, help the web and the rich web and web apps bloom, come work at Google with these incredible people. Meet your co-founders. Go start a startup, leave Google. We will then reacquire you back into Google in a couple of years.

Ben: It happened dozens or hundreds of times.

David: I remember seeing this happen from the outside and thought Google is nuts to let this happen. But I realize now, no, this was all part of the strategy. It’s all good for the web.

Ben: You can run very indirect, generous, long-term strategies like that with a money printer like AdWords.

David: Yes.

Ben: I know I keep coming back to that. But that is at the core of what drives everything. This one’s a little bit less playbook, but just an observation. I watched the Google IO keynote with Glass and I watched a bunch of Glass content. I even back in the day at a startup weekend, launched a Google Glass app.

David: Nice.

Ben: So after watching all this Glass content and it’s the butt of every joke now, Meta Ray bands and Google Glass are the same thing feature-wise. The gestures on the side, the fact that it could take a photo, Google Glass was a little more advanced. It could run these like very basic text-based apps. But I’m sure when meta launches their little hologram version of the glasses, that’s going to be eerily similar. You could say, oh, it’s just timing but here’s the thing.

Google’s made you look like a cyborg Meta’s is for normal people and there is no better metaphor for the cultural difference between Facebook and Google than this. Google’s a bunch of wacky academics who did not really understand why this would make the product fail. Facebook is founded on the idea that you’re trying to be cool.

David: Yeah, went and did a partnership with Essilor Luxottica to get the tech into glasses that normal people wear.

Ben: Yes. It was crazy watching these demos because these are the meta ar demos. It just happens to have a cool factor versus not.

David: Yeah.

Ben: My last one is this idea that they did figure out a way culturally to get people amped about just build great products, figure out how to do something really hard from an engineering perspective that ends up being really useful and ship things that people love. It’s not that you didn’t have to think about a business model, but a lot of the time for many years after launching a product, you really didn’t.

David: Yep. It’s like we talked about earlier, there was this thin layer of really, really, really tight, really great strategy that was just like a few people at the top of the company, but below that it was just make a great product.

Ben: Yes.

David: All right. I’ve got two for playbook. One that I’m going to make my quintessence, I just want to underscore again, we said this in the Android chapter, but like Android was the mother of all wins. It was so big to win with Android. Nobody stretches a business model across technology eras nobody. Google did it

Ben: In a dominant way where they are, they are the dominant company in the next era as well.

David: Yeah. It is the Google version of Azure from our Microsoft series. It absolves any and all sins, not that there were many at Google. The only one was Google Plus.

Ben: The only way it could have gone better is if instead of launching Android, they launched the iPhone and they also got the iPhone profits rather than just some small dollars that protected their core business.

David: That was my playbook. Then my quintessence is, it is wild that this one company has eight products with over a billion users and started this era with just one Search that didn’t even have a billion users yet, but Search, Android, Chrome, YouTube, Gmail maps, drive photos, and then if you count the Playstore as separate from Android, which Google does, I think that’s a bit of a stretch. But if you do then they have nine products with over a billion users. Just for context, Meta is the next highest count of products in one company with over a billion users. They have four, the Blue App, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. Meta likes to claim they have five. They like to say that Meta AI in aggregate has over a billion users embedded across all their products.

Ben: But this whole super intelligence thing is an admission that the active users of Meta AI is a little stretchy.

David: If the Playstore doesn’t really count on its own, the meta AI for sure doesn’t really count on its own. Meta has four. Apple I think only has three, maybe four. The three Apple has for sure are iPhone, iMessage and Safari, iPad maybe I don’t think so. Mac definitely not.

Ben: I basically don’t count any iPhone app because they all come for free when you get the phone.

David: Okay, by your definition Apple has one with iPhone.

Ben: I think Apple has one.

David: Okay. All right.

Ben: Let’s take that same definition. How many of these came for free at Google? Google search, Android, those are two completely different distribution channels. Chrome.

David: Yep. I don’t think any of these came for free.

Ben: Google helped Chrome.

David: These are all independently have achieved billion plus users.

Ben: Gmail and Google Drive advantage each other. I think you can subtract one of those out.

David: Yeah. But it’s not to the extent that iMessage is default with an iPhone.

Ben: Right. Maps is advantaged by Android. They ship a whole lot of maps.Probably whatever the phone was would have a great Google Maps app.

David: Yep. Okay. All right. I buy it, Apple has one. Microsoft has two windows and LinkedIn. Amazon doesn’t have any billion user products. Google’s got eight, like that’s incredible.

Ben: Call it seven or six. I think it is reasonable to subtract. Okay,

David: Okay, Fine. But whatever.

Ben: That’s exactly right.

David: That’s my point. This is my quintessence. This period at Google is a run like nobody’s ever had.

Ben: Yeah, absolutely. Right.

David: All right, what you got.

Ben: So quintessence for me is the thing that I can’t stop thinking about from the episode. I decided this time I knew what it was going in and I decided to hide it all the way until the end. we haven’t talked about this thing yet.

David: Okay.

Ben: Almost all of Google’s successful products are based on a core technology insight that is underneath the whole thing. The type of insight that could be in an academic journal. Someone told me this and I’ve been using it as a little litmus test for, will a product work or not. As you look through, you look at the original search that is by definition the page rank algorithm is a core technology insight.

David: They published it as an academic paper.

Ben: The way that the ad-based auction works is a core, it’s almost mechanical in its elegance and its brilliance and its simplicity. It is a technology insight that in everything we talked about in Google part one, our first episode, then you look at everything that succeeded this episode Gmail, the way that they’re able to do the gigabyte of storage AJAX fast responsive web application. You look at maps and docs with realtime collaboration, breakthrough core technology insight.

David: Yeah, totally. Serving video on demand to the entire world.

Ben: Being able to scale that and make it a real going concern. Chrome four core technology insights. Maybe six, maybe seven in the original comic. Android, I can’t name one magical core insight. This one may be the exception because that’s technically hard and all that, but there’s not like an elegant thing. That’s the reason that Android succeeded. It was perfect execution in a lot of ways, strategically distribution, marketing partnerships.

David: Okay, wait, no, I got what it is. It’s the same thing as the iPhone. It was an incredible achievement to wrestle OS 10 into iOS and to get it to run on a battery powered mobile device that fit in your pocket. Android did the same thing with Linux. They wrestled Linux into a battery powered mobile device that fits in your pocket.

Ben: Yep. Less of an elegant, satisfying core insight I think and not the reason that it worked. Not the reason why Android, unlike these other ones there’s a clear line between, it’s almost like the Google products that succeed wildly organically except for Android are ones where there’s almost no product. The technology solution is just so incredible that it is directly the user experience and you get the technology breakthrough as the experience.

David: I see where you’re going

Ben: But then look at the other ones. Google Plus, Google Wave these are like products. These are like user experiences that people come up with that don’t necessarily have a breakthrough technology underneath them. Google Photo is actually quite the opposite. All of the AI stuff that’s been happening on Google Photos for a very long time, that’s why it worked, people wanted all these incredible magic features that come with Google Photos. It’s funny, as someone told me this in the research, it has been batting around in my head and then I’m reading Eric Schmidt’s book and Eric Schmidt said he would ask PMs, what is your core technical insight that makes it all work?

And if there wasn’t a good answer, he wouldn’t fund the project. They figured this out at Google too. It’s a googly thing that this genius technology is the product itself. If you try to craft some cool idea that you have that is not just directly translating tech breakthrough, it’s not going to be the type of product that succeeds at Google. They don’t know how some people can make an Instagram and those people are not Google.

David: Yeah. Ironic that Kevin Systrom was an erstwhile Google employee who left to start a startup.

Ben: Yes. Anyway, I think that has made it extremely clear to me when Google products succeed and when they fail.

David: Love it. Spot on.

Ben: All right. Carve outs.

David: Carve outs. I’ve got one and then I’ve got my long awaited follow up.

Ben: Oh my God. We’ve been waiting with bated breath. Listeners, what game console did David buy?

David: I’m going to make everybody wait for one more minute. My actual carve out for the episode is when we were in New York for Radio City, my whole family came, the girls came and we stayed for the rest of the week after the show and we took the girls to the Bluey experience at the camp store in New York City. It was awesome. Lived up to expectations, lived up to the hype. They basically have recreated the Bluey house in this physical space in New York City. The house is almost a character in the show and they have recreated it and they just let you and your kids in ,to roam free in the house. Then you have a magical moment at the end of the experience.

Ben: Ah..

David: It was cool. Highly, highly recommend if you are in the bluey demographic and happen to be a New York.

Ben: Okay. What game console did you pick?

David: I bought the Steam Deck.

Ben: The Steam Deck.

David: I bought the Steam deck and it’s great. Although I haven’t, truth be told, had much time to play it this past month with everything we’ve had going on at Radio City and then preparing this episode. But it’s great.

Ben: How’d you pick? What was the ultimate?

David: It ultimately came down to, as much as I desperately wanted my older daughter to be ready to play Mario Kart with me. She’s just not.

Ben: And so if you’re buying a console for just you to enjoy, you went with the Steam deck.

David: Yeah. I was like, ah, I would probably enjoy the Steam deck.

Ben: Do you endorse it? Do you recommend it?

David: What Valve has done with the Steam deck, I didn’t realize until buying it and using it is incredible. They have abstracted a PC gaming machine into a console experience. I’ve always liked PC type games, but I haven’t been a PC gamer in many, many years because I'm not going to build a gaming machine or even you could just buy one. But like, I don’t need another pc. Where am I going to put it? What am I going to do with it? I want the console simplicity of just buy the thing, turn it on, buy the games, play them. Valve has created that in handheld form. It’s awesome. You don’t have to worry about any of the drivers or specs. It’s really, really impressive.

Ben: Alright, good to know.

David: I will buy a switch too at some point, probably in the next year or so. But for now, steam Deck. Alright. What are your carve outs?

Ben: I’ve got three.

David: Oh great.

Ben: My first one, and I swear to God this is unrelated to their sponsorship, is Claude.

David: Amazing. It’s so great.

Ben: It’s so good. Using AI has completely changed the way that I prepare for these episodes now and I cannot imagine going back.

David: I hear AI is a thing.

Ben: I hear AI is a thing. That's the first one. I just find myself in it all day now. Two is the Sony RX100 VII or seven. I recently bought a different camera, the Fuji X100 VI or the six.

David: Yeah, that’s what you had in New York.

Ben: It's great. It’s like the Internet’s favorite camera. It has these amazing film simulation color profiles. It’s like a camera though. I carry it around my neck because it’s a camera that you hold and use and it’s very fun shooting 35 millimeter equivalent. It feels like I’m taking pictures the way that pictures were meant to be taken.

David: It’s not a full DSLR but it is like a big thing.

Ben: Exactly. It’s a handheld, but I wouldn’t call it a pocket camera. Now the funny thing is, the thing that I’m actually talking about is my carve out is the Sony Camera, Shield Monat tweeted actually this morning, I should have been praying for this episode and I was like replying to him on Twitter instead that he’s been considering getting this Sony or another point and shoot camera. I just remembered how much I love this camera. The Sony RX 107 fits in my pocket. It’s very small, it has a giant zoom lens for its size and I was just looking at some of the pictures that I’ve taken with it. It’s like the perfect thing to bring with a phone whenever I am space constrained, which is usually, I just don’t really want a camera around my neck. The perfect combo is bring a phone and bring the Sony.

I am aware that it’s not a full frame camera. I’m aware that it’s not as photographery as my Fuji, but it is the most practical one for most things that I want to do. For many, many shots it is far superior to shooting on a camera phone. I don’t know, I just love it. It’s a 2019 camera and they really need to come out with one that has USB-C because it’s annoying to charge. But other than that, it’s just awesome. I highly recommend it.

David: There you go, you’re bringing it full circle on this episode. A point and shoot camera.

Ben: A point and shoot camera. Especially paired with Lightroom has this great AI feature called De-Noise that they launched and is now rolled out in production is incredible.

David: Love it.

Ben: Then I have one more last one, a listener recently sent me, he started a clothing company called [inaudible:04:07:52] and it is an incredible garment. It is just like a really, really nice cashmere shirt. I’ve been wearing it all recording, it’s great. On a cool day, it’s great on a warm day. It’s my current favorite shirt. I wanted to thank the listener that sent it to me and say, you have built a, the prices are high, very nice clothing company, but just excellent products.

David: I’ve been staring at you for the past seven and a half hours here and I’ve been thinking the whole time, God, Ben is looking good.

Ben: My normal thing, if I could just wear it every day, is a long sleeve dark crew neck. Just like I don’t have to think about it. You can look nice in it. It just goes with everything. It’s the capsule wardrobe idea and this is the finest version of that that I’ve worn. It’s really great.

David: Nice.

Ben: All right, with that listeners, our huge thanks to our partners this season. J.P.Morgan Payments, trusted, reliable payments infrastructure for your business, no matter the scale. That’s J.P.morgan.com/acquired and Thropic the makers of Claude claude.ai/acquired, StatZig the best way to do experimentation and more as a product development team. That’s stat zig.com/acquired and Vercel your complete platform for web development and V0. That is vercel.com/acquired. Click the links in the show notes to learn more. We have a bunch of people to thank for contributing to this episode.

David: Yes, yes we do. Hiroshi Lockheimer, Tim Armstrong, Sam Schillace, Hunter Walk, Nick Fox, Shona Brown, Clay Bavor, a bunch of folks who helped a little bit here, but more are going to be for the next episode. Max Ross, Greg Carrado, Demis Hassabis. Ben, you had a bunch of folks who you spoke to as well.

Ben: Yeah, as always, I want to thank Arvind Navaratnam from Worldly Partners for his excellent writeup, which you can find linked in the show notes also Paul Buki, creator of Gmail, Bill Corin, Jonathan Rochelle, Bradley Horowitz, John Hanky, Ben Eidelson, Eisar Lipkovitz, and Ben Liebald.

David: And that is in addition to as always the many folks who helped us, whose names we can’t say here. But no, you are appreciated. Thanks to all of you for listening.

Ben: Seriously, if you like this episode and you’re like, oh wait, there’s a Google episode before this. Most of you have probably listened, but if you have not, go check out our first episode on the origin of Google and the creation of the search engine and the search business of course our Microsoft series, part one, part two in an interview with Steve Ballmer.

David: If you want the other side of the story too, everything we talked about here,

Ben: In addition, our giant episode on meta is probably pretty relevant and we referenced it several times after this episode. Check out ACQ2, our second show where we talk to founders and CEOs building businesses in areas that we have covered on the show. Our last one was with Google Legends, really industry legends. Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor  about the current state of AI and where we are headed. Search ACQ2 in any podcast player. Come chat with us in the slack that’s acquired.fm/slack and join the email list for all the excellent email goodies, including voting on episodes for this fall.

David: Woo-Hoo.

Ben: Without listeners, we’ll see you next time.

David: We’ll see you next time.