Nobody was questioning the economics, it's obvious why they do what they do. I was questioning the kind of company Google wants to be. It can be greater (in my eyes anyway). For example, Apple can still generate phenomenal profits just on the basis of their product and doesn't need to resort to putting ads everywhere.
When you have optimized your company structure, culture etc for one type of output, it is not easy to do things that are entirely different. It will either deliver a compromised "new" output, or (even worse), compromise the output that is the mainstay of the company.
Google could not just become a wildly profitable Apple-style "hardware first" company overnight (or, arguably, ever).
Conversely, we have all seen Apple struggling to deliver cloud services that are reliable and desirable (beyond their integration into Apple's ecosystem) since the days of iTools and MobileMe..
