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I'm not sure Microsoft had such a grand vision early on; they were late to the Internet after all. And their public cloud play came along later as well. Neither did Apple. And I'd say that Google went from organizing the world's information to mostly selling ads.



I would say that Google monetized organizing the world's information by selling ads. That is pretty exactly what they did with search and search ads.


Except that they largely deprioritized things besides search because they couldn't monetize to the same degree. Google Reader, Scholar, Books (and yes I know there were legal issues), Deja News/Groups, etc. They continue to sort of support things like Blogger but they're clearly not a priority. To Google, the "world's information" is mostly restricted to information they can serve search ads against.


Agree but still a grand vision. Organizing the world's monetizable information and making it accessible.

They added the monetizable part later.

There has been other information besides the web that they have organized: YouTube.


I don't really disagree. They narrowed their vision over time but did start out with a grand vision.




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