An oversimplified version is this: So there are two core very critical components to the mid/late-phase tech megacorp strategy, you need to protect the core money printing product at all cost first and sustain that fiercely over a long period of time (decade+), then use any and all profits to find/fund the next cash cow, looking for optionality. While doing that, grow the market or consume a larger share of market. Google benefited from mainly the latter two and all while the internet blew up globally, funneling even more money into the machine.
It’s no secret that nearly every Google product that wasn’t search, lost them money. They were searching for the next big thing. They likely were some of the first to see AI as exactly that but moved too slowly to commercialize. Likely because of bureaucracy risk and also perhaps some sense of altruism in knowing the cataclysmic impacts AI could have. There have been plenty of former Google employees confirming this.
They also used to do things just to be cool, but those days have been long gone since Larry Page tapped out (and probably a few years before that, about a decade). Since then they’ve almost completely lost sight of what made them so successful that nobody even knows their vision or identity as a company today. These don’t correlate to market cap but they do silently lead to stagnation.
Their brand protects them from quite a lot but it’s not invincible.