Ben Gilbert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…It's been very academic. They've never had to go into a hard business. I don't know what Google's advertising margins are, but that business probably runs at, I guess it depends if you put sales above the line or below the line, but 80% gross margins. A 30% gross margin business is not particularly attractive to them, nor are they good at sales. I know they're getting better. The narrative at the time was they made this G Suite thing, which at the time was called Google Apps, but no one would buy it. They ended up giving basically all of it away for free to consumers forever. Google Docs, Gmail, and everything. It was the best thing to use, and they couldn't figure out any way to sell it to enterprises. They didn't have the competency of enterprise sales the way that Microsoft did. They didn't have the ability like Amazon to operate in these really hard businesses, eeking out every last dollar. It just looked unattractive. Meanwhile, they actually had the best technology for it. They actually operated these big datacenters and this really novel way of networking all the computers together in order to pull off search. They were inventing machine learning before machine learning. A huge value prop of the cloud now is all your data is in the cloud. That way, you can use a bunch of stuff that Google invented, TensorFlow, Kubernetes, to run your stuff in the cloud. This also was theirs to win, but they didn't have the sales and marketing muscle. I don't think they have the iron gut that Amazon had to go do something grinded out and hard. I think they also made the mistake that you're originally talking about. I thought you were talking about Google, and then you said it was Microsoft, too, of building too far in the future. I think Google made that mistake, too.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.