Google took on and basically CRUSHED some major market players and powers (Microsoft basically lost the entire web and handset markets from a monopoly position) as a result of google service offerings.

Check out how much money they pumped into firefox as well - that used to be a major part of their push vis a vis IE.

Regardless of how much google "sucks" - they seem to have at least some things that folks like.

I'd thought they were doomed (ie, no linux cloud offering expected, no multi-platform or open source offerings). Windows Mobile did crash and burn, but Azure actually has linux containers (most common type I think) and their other stuff is sometimes open source / linux friendly now - (SQL Server??) it's whiplash for those of us who were around for the EEE period.