Is it fully accurate (or helpful) to think of Google only as an advertising company? Movie theaters and gas stations earn most of their profit on concessions and ancillary stuff that isn't the central product or service, yet we don't think of either as strictly a "concession" or food service business.

The movie ticket receipts go to the studios. Tickets alone don't make the theatres any money. For a bunch of historical reasons (antitrust) studios don't own the theaters.

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/11/united-state...

Gas stations make barely a profit of selling gas.

maybe you consider these weak points in support of the argument, and I'm not certain I agree with all of them either, but its a starting point. here, first few things off the top of my head:

1. highest market cap of a major tech company that is a) an important part of masses of people's daily lives, b) working on experimental projects that will not realize their fruits in the short term, c) has intimated a progressive vision for society.

2. has the necessary funds, personnel resources, knowledge base, and lobbying power to accomplish ambitious goals.

3. category definer for the domain of internet search advertising, which is actually a bigger deal than you make it out to be. this corresponds to a very basic human need: finding what you're looking for, including things you're looking to buy.

4. philosophically speaking, seems to have an actual grasp on what it is they are doing beyond the simplistic definition "making money" or "increase shareholder value". their actions are (if you believe their own statements about it anyway) guided by a coherent vision to "organize the world's information".

5. has already changed the way people speak and think about using the internet, which is the civilizational mega-project of our time that will have irreversible impact on human culture from this point forward.

I guess then we first need to establish what properties 'the worlds most important company' would be likely to have. To me, the company would have to be firmly established as a key player in so many different markets such that if the company were to vanish they would literally be chaos on the streets.

hmm, I think that describes something different. "the world's most indispensable company". google isn't that. not sure what is. maybe the big oil companies (collectively) are indispensable? that's kind of a shame really. no company should be indispensable.

to me though, google is clearly important, in a historical sense. they are building things that change the world. they also seem to care (at least pay lip service) to trying to change the world in a way that is a net positive for most people.

The argument, as I've heard it, is that everyone goes to Google to find things, thus the "view" of the world is filtered by Google. If they like you, you are very visible to the world, if they don't, then you are not. So to some their very existence depends on Google returning a way to communicate with them in response to the appropriate question.

That said, while it makes it very important to an olive oil producer that they can be "found" it is less important to you and I that we find that exact olive oil producer in response to the question about where we could acquire olive oil. So Google is asymmetrically important.

The asymmetric value (producers need Google's favor more than consumers) leads to SEO as an industry, which in turn isn't always great for consumers. I can't remember which items off the top of my head, but every now and then I try to google a thing I'm not familiar with and it takes some effort to find results that aren't trying to sell me that thing.

Pretty much any highly contested search with purchase intent is going to be nearly impossible to search for. Try "free credit card" some time, or "cure for headaches" :-)

"Does anyone know what this argument is?"

He makes it right in the article:

"It is worth $500 billion" - which is a pretty small group of companies (two)

"Six Google products have more than one billion users" - again a pretty significant achievement. Facebook has 1 or 2. Apple has none - the iPhone has sold about 700M units across all models apparently.

"I use Google to research stories, I email my editors through Gmail, and I use Google Maps to go to meetings." - people in first world countries probably use a google product every day. Few companies have that level of global reach and touch so many people's everyday lives.

Advertising is a very old profession, it predates humans. Flowers are mostly advertising, and most people consider them beautiful. Perhaps there is hope for a startup that could make advertising more like flowers.

Okay, but there is a generally understood definition of advertising as used in common parlance. I'm certain you're aware of it.

Diluting it to mean things like "Oh me telling you my name is also a form of advertising" doesn't really do anything.

By flowers advertising, it means, flowers look pretty to attract insects and animals, who will get stuck with the pollen and help the plant reproduce. He's diluting it down to "attracting something, someone on a visceral level for own benefit".

If 90% (that was the figure when I last looked at them a year back), or at the very least an overwhelmingly large percentage of your revenue comes from advertising, you're an advertising company.

In that case, Apple is just a smartphone company and Microsoft is just an enterprise software company.

I understand your motive to label Google as just an advertising company, but just because their monetization strategy is the result of being the best search engine company on the planet doesn't mean you need to belittle their accomplishments.

Additionally, since Apple makes the majority of their money from selling phones it doesn't negate the fact that they were also a "advertising" company up until the day the realized it was a failed venture and wasn't worth sinking more time and resources into. Regardless of Apple's pro-user rhetoric they did exactly what Google did, but were just very unsuccessful at it.