What’s Strategic for Google?

Google makes 99% of their revenue selling text ads for things like airplane tickets, dvd players, and malpractice lawyers. A project is strategic for Google if it affects what sits between the person clicking on an ad and the company paying for the ad.

Here is my rough breakdown of the "layers in the stack" between humans and the money:

Human - device – OS – browser – bandwidth – websites - ads – ad tech – relationship to advertiser – $$$

At each layer, Google either wants to dominate it or commoditize it. (For more on the strategic move known as commoditizing the complement