Most modern companies don't need cheap computing. They have a lot of users generating revenues, and they usually need little computing resources.
Google always worked by giving everything free to people. (Google, Gmail, Maps, Youtube, Android, Chrome). And they have extremely infrastructure intensive applications to run (e.g. just gotta copy the entire internet to index it + serve years of videos per second :D).
For every paid click/page a user will see, he will go through hundreds of page paying nothing, and Google will have to make thousands of pre-computations to be able to serve it in the first place.
That's the world Google lives in. They had to be hyper efficient since day 1 or they couldn't survive.
(Also note that they started > 15 years ago. The available hardware was 2^5 smaller at the time).
Most modern companies don't need cheap computing. They have a lot of users generating revenues, and they usually need little computing resources.
Google always worked by giving everything free to people. (Google, Gmail, Maps, Youtube, Android, Chrome). And they have extremely infrastructure intensive applications to run (e.g. just gotta copy the entire internet to index it + serve years of videos per second :D).
For every paid click/page a user will see, he will go through hundreds of page paying nothing, and Google will have to make thousands of pre-computations to be able to serve it in the first place.
That's the world Google lives in. They had to be hyper efficient since day 1 or they couldn't survive.
(Also note that they started > 15 years ago. The available hardware was 2^5 smaller at the time).