I hate to be so critical, but this article sucks. If I realized it was a forbes blogger site I would have skipped it; those seem to be consistently low quality.

I hate to be so critical, but this article sucks. If I realized it was a forbes blogger site I would have skipped it; those seem to be consistently low quality. >each one of these functions could be a robust company itself. >3.) The Future Seriously? I literally groaned when I saw that 1/3 of the article was devoted to something as vague and silly as 'the future' - what most companies would simply call R&D or innovation. And how exactly would that be a robust company? Self-driving cars show promise but wouldn't make a robust company until there is a product and market. Singularity is an interesting philosophical concept but I'm unclear how it will make google money (if it will even happen in the next few generations). The other two categories, user services and advertising, are obvious to anyone who knows anything about google. And really, these two are pretty intertwined at google: user services provide an advertising medium and advertising pays for user services. It's always been this way, and probably will be for many years.