> The opposing point of view would be that Ads on FB/Google are so profitable that working on anything else pales in comparision (in terms of profit generation). And so they dont innovate, but iterate and optimize.
This argument is basically the same posed in the Innovator's Dilemma, and IMO it's more on the money at least for Google. The high hiring bar for Google was arguably much higher in its earlier years, when they were still innovating like crazy. Becoming a larger company, having a larger executive team instead of Larry and Sergey, and optimizing for profits rather than moonshots and "creative" projects like Loon, Wing, and even projects with a lot of internal support like Inbox all have an effect trending towards "less entrepreneurial".
People also seem to generally have a pretty big bias towards Cloud not being considered "entrepreneurial", while still having a huge engineering opportunity cost. You're comparing Facebook and Google but Google has spun out a #3 Cloud provider in the last ~7 years that people largely ignore despite that making up almost half of Google's employee count at the moment.
This argument is basically the same posed in the Innovator's Dilemma, and IMO it's more on the money at least for Google. The high hiring bar for Google was arguably much higher in its earlier years, when they were still innovating like crazy. Becoming a larger company, having a larger executive team instead of Larry and Sergey, and optimizing for profits rather than moonshots and "creative" projects like Loon, Wing, and even projects with a lot of internal support like Inbox all have an effect trending towards "less entrepreneurial".
People also seem to generally have a pretty big bias towards Cloud not being considered "entrepreneurial", while still having a huge engineering opportunity cost. You're comparing Facebook and Google but Google has spun out a #3 Cloud provider in the last ~7 years that people largely ignore despite that making up almost half of Google's employee count at the moment.