This is an annoying meme. Are concession stands the flagship product of movie theaters?
People use Google for search, email, maps, etc. And that's what the company was built for. If they had a better way to monetize than ads, they would certainly drop ads.
> Are concession stands the flagship product of movie theaters?
Actually, yeah. I worked in cinema (as a projectionist) before getting into tech, and the management definitely saw the food counter as more important than the movies being shown.
So is McDonalds a drink company? It makes most of its money from drinks...
The way a company makes its money is only weakly correlated to the service it offers to users. Think about it: if McDonalds stopped selling food, it would not have any customers. If Google stopped offering search, it would not have any users.
If we're going to simplify or generalize, I would simplify McDonald's to being a "sugar and salt" company. Those are the cravings in the human brain that it satisfies.
But yeah, I agree with you. Businesses are more complex than individual touchpoints.
Google is a ad company who uses search to attract customers.
I don't see the McDonald's reference as the same, drinks are part of their food product. Ads are not a integrated part of search (google did not start out having ads).
If your magazine starts handling ads in every other publisher's magazines too and then starts handling ads in TV and then starts putting up billboards by the highways, I'd say the answer isn't so obvious.
Technically, movie theaters are in the business of selling "movie experiences", which include the movie, the dark room, the chairs, and yes, the concession stands.
True, it's not a perfect analogy. Popcorn is additive to the experience. Even if theaters could survive sans popcorn sales, they'd still keep it because it's part of the experience.
I was just referring to the fact that theaters make most of their money from concessions, but you wouldn't then call them a concession company. No one would go to a theater just for the concessions. They would (and do) go just for the movie though.
> "Movie theaters wanted nothing to do with popcorn," Smith says, "because they were trying to duplicate what was done in real theaters. They had beautiful carpets and rugs and didn't want popcorn being ground into it." Movie theaters were trying to appeal to a highbrow clientele, and didn't want to deal with the distracting trash of concessions—or the distracting noise that snacking during a film would create.
> When films added sound in 1927, the movie theater industry opened itself up to a much wider clientele, since literacy was no longer required to attend films (the titles used [in] early silent films restricted their audience). [emphasis added]
Either way you cut it (search or advertising), Google's flagship product's success depends critically on their ability to do machine learning better than other people.
I would be inclined to say search is still their flagship. While advertising is their monetary powerhouse, it is still search that leads their fleet of products as a household name.
Assuming you're correct, that means the whole market for google's primary revenue source took a century to bring in what Apple makes in 2 years.
Really goes to show how much the market works on the 2nd derivative, and how that can result in immensely disproportionate market caps relative to a company's profitability.
If I were Apple I would think about seriously ramping up the stock buyback at this point. If they keep it up long enough they could even take themselves private one day.
I would argue that Apple's reputation for quality design - reliability, build quality, simplicity (though these may be changing), along with first-class industrial and UI design - is what drives their products. The definition of a "trinket" is something that is of little value. Material artifacts with the above qualities have always been of value.
