Amazon had its ups and downs, but with them and Uber it was never a great intellectual leap to see how they could be very profitable. That's not at all the case

Amazon had its ups and downs, but with them and Uber it was never a great intellectual leap to see how they could be very profitable. That's not at all the case for Google or Facebook. As late as 2002 Google itself wasn't convinced that it could succeed by selling ads, and their next best idea for making money was so uninspired that Silicon Valley spent several seasons mocking it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search_Appliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search_Appliance