Google search, Maps, and GMail are the big 3 web services. These don't bring in revenue all by themselves, but they bring users to look at ads which is where they make all their money. There's also Chrome (directs people to Google services and facilitates their use of those services). Finally, there's Android, which is a little different but like Apple, they get revenue from the Play Store on it, and again push users to use their own search engine and browser.

> but they bring users to look at ads which is where they make all their money Ad sales is their golden egg. Practically everything else is an egg truck to sell that one thing.

Ads by themselves aren't a golden egg. Users don't want to look at ads, and certainly aren't going to pay for them. That's why they came up with those other products, to sell ads to advertisers.

It's just like newspapers: historically successful papers like the NYT didn't get rich by doing great journalism and selling papers to people, they got rich selling ads, with the journalism being a way to get people to subscribe to the paper.

The pair of eyeballs are an integral part of the ad product that is sold to customers who buy ad spots.

Cows don't want to be eaten but burgers are absolutely McDonalds golden egg.

The only potential outlier is the cloud stuff, but even then I think it's essentially a 'economies of scale' thing, for the same reason Amazon started AWS, rather than a real revenue centre.