I mean, maybe after 15 years they seem status quo. But almost all of these were revolutionary at the time... do you remember videos before Youtube, collaboration before Docs, email before Gmail or maps before Maps?

Yes, Google makes money off ads. But how does that discount them being innovations (which, btw, is a qualification you came up with... nobody above you even said they were).

Maybe the innovation is that Google bought some interesting new translation/mapping/phoneOS thing and made it robust enough to power half the world?

Sure, they bought it because they saw that it will go nicely with their adtech thing.

Or who knows. Really. Google is very big. They always has been quirky and enormously successful and profitable. It's very hard to attribute causality to its actions retroactively, especially because even the small numbers are in the billions range, but they are always dwarfed by the adtech blob.

But there's room for nuance. 74% of their revenue was from adtech in 2019 (11 months, 162B USD)

But that means they made 40+ billion from other "stuff" ( https://d3jlwjv6gmyigl.cloudfront.net/images/2020/04/Google-... ).

One of the big problems of Google is that anything that does not integrate with adtech just doesn't really makes sense for them. They have no real model of what to do with things that are not adtech. Chat apps? Whatever the current flavor is. Social network? Yeah, we tried to copy FB, made everyone put +1 buttons everywhere, but ... did not really matter, as it was an insecure hack and it did not really give that oompfh to adtech that they expected.

But they could have kept G+. There's a constant need for a FB alternative. Every time FB fucks up a bunch of people would have tried G+. I'm not saying G+ was good, but shutting it did not make much sense. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯