To be fair, with the exception of hardware and retail companies, almost all internet era companies make their revenue from selling ads because people have a neg

To be fair, with the exception of hardware and retail companies, almost all internet era companies make their revenue from selling ads because people have a negative reaction to roadblocks and paywalls. Facebook is just as beholden to ads to Google is. I would argue that most of the Google products that are successes today in terms of users: Gmail, Chrome, Android, Maps, Search, etc have competed on the same merits as similar products from competitors. Yahoo Mail or Hotmail, for example, are subsidized by other products as well. I don't think Google has a monopoly on talented individuals, but I do think Google has a better culture than other companies. You can have the smartest people, but a shitty internal culture can act to break their innovation, not multiply it. I've worked at IBM and Oracle and definitely, very smart people at Oracle that I knew of were hampered and stymied by a suffocating corporate layer.