It's like a never-ending horde of zombies that keep coming and repeating the same argument. So as ever, my reply is going to be the same. Sure, they cost money, but they cost more or less, and they either do or don't cost engineering resources, and they cost more or less of those as well. Nobody can articulate what the missing browser feature is, that's not there because of this bet on side bets. No one can articulate the relative scale of the investment on side bets and what the impact is on engineering resources and no one can draw a connection between that and market share (if anything, it's the relatively inexpensive resource demand that probably made them attractive strategic options to begin with). And none of this is responsive to actual macro-level forces that drive market share, which is Google leveraging its footprint in the search space, in Android, and over Chromebooks to drive up its own market share.
And those are the things you would have to think through in order for any of that argument to work, not just hand-wave toward their possibility. The ability to trace cause and effect, the ability to assess the relative scale of different investments, these are all like the 101 level things that would sanity check the argument.
The option I don't see listed in your post is for the developers to do nothing except for maintain, fix bugs, fix CVEs, maybe comply with new standards, maybe find ways to make it faster.
It's like a never-ending horde of zombies that keep coming and repeating the same argument. So as ever, my reply is going to be the same. Sure, they cost money, but they cost more or less, and they either do or don't cost engineering resources, and they cost more or less of those as well. Nobody can articulate what the missing browser feature is, that's not there because of this bet on side bets. No one can articulate the relative scale of the investment on side bets and what the impact is on engineering resources and no one can draw a connection between that and market share (if anything, it's the relatively inexpensive resource demand that probably made them attractive strategic options to begin with). And none of this is responsive to actual macro-level forces that drive market share, which is Google leveraging its footprint in the search space, in Android, and over Chromebooks to drive up its own market share.
And those are the things you would have to think through in order for any of that argument to work, not just hand-wave toward their possibility. The ability to trace cause and effect, the ability to assess the relative scale of different investments, these are all like the 101 level things that would sanity check the argument.