It is also good to ask why Google could not succeed at social media. Perhaps network effects and an equally agile competitor were a big enough moat for Facebook

It is also good to ask why Google could not succeed at social media. Perhaps network effects and an equally agile competitor were a big enough moat for Facebook to fight off Google successfully. To say that abuse of monopoly is what has enabled Google to grow big is too simplistic. They have succeeded brilliantly in areas where they had equally big competitors, and failed spectacularly as well in others - social media being the most prominent. But more tech focused readers will recall Wave, or NaCl. Then are cases where we have a stalemate for example G Suite, where Microsoft still holds it own with Office. Google Cloud is a strange case where one can argue that Google has failed to leverage many of its own innovations in containers and other data center infrastructure to achieve a dominant position. I would argue this is a case where Google should have been a market leader and much like Microsoft in the 2000's has frittered away a natural advantage.