Smartphones are definitely hard mode and they were the focus of the major tech companies those years. So the more important takeaway is that Google doesn’t rea

Smartphones are definitely hard mode and they were the focus of the major tech companies those years. So the more important takeaway is that Google doesn’t really care about deliveries. Looking at stock market charts and saying, oh so and so event affected price, oh here’s a “low price” as defined relative to now... is still drawing on charts with crayons. Anyway, in terms of the substance of what is being said here - success is always obvious in hindsight. Probably the focus of incumbents plays a much bigger role than anything in particular Facebook or Booking.com were doing. For example, for those years after the Facebook IPO and for the “crayon says low price” part of Booking’s chart, Google kept doubling down on Android, paying 12.5x more for Motorola than Facebook paid for Instagram. How many operating systems are there? They clearly won that market, even despite disasters like the Motorola acquisition. They have an ads business, and they also acquired ITA (a Booking competitor?) but mobile is where they put their big bucks. Just the Motorola purchase probably exceeded their combined spending on Google+ by 20x. Likewise Microsoft was spending on... again, mobile, with a Nokia acquisition. Amazon was... developing the Kindle Fire line. And then, nowadays, when Microsoft paid $22b for LinkedIn when it could have bought Instagram for less. This analysis isn’t bulletproof either, it tells you what a giant company was interested in but not if it was a good decision. Listen, I think it’s fine, drawing crayons on charts. But if you evaluate Facebook based on its acquisitions you should evaluate everything based on acquisitions. And the sort of obvious conclusions are that while big money was focusing on mobile and eliminating all other upstart competition, other upstarts had lucrative opportunities obviously underpriced by the markets.