I don't think that is a fair assessment; Google's core products are the links that are on the top of the google.com landing page. Amazon's core product is the s

I don't think that is a fair assessment; Google's core products are the links that are on the top of the google.com landing page. Amazon's core product is the sale of physical goods, they are just trying to stay on the leading edge of things and get a foothold in digital goods while the getting is still good. They know that being early to market is insanely important today, even a year delay can end up being the difference between Groupon and Google Deals. It's typically impossible to compete with an entrenched product by one of the big tech corps as they have the engineering man power to duplicate any improvement you make over their formula if you start depriving them of the tiniest portion of their user base.