To me, the strategy is clearly making money on advertising by leveraging customer data. Our actual products are just the means to mine this data. I've worked on some of the systems that intercept all the web traffic on the cellular network which can analyze what you are doing down to the individual customer level. This behavioral data is very valuable.
So, yeah, we are trying to out-Google Google, and it is a huge mistake. This is where outsourcing all our computing resources will bite us. We have to pay a vendor for resources to model and analyze the data at any useful scale. We have to deal with the bureaucratic inter-corporate process of moving sensitive data in and out of our network, and the breaches/lawsuits that come as a result. We also have to pay a fleet of amateur "Data Scientists" with their nanodegrees to build algorithms to compete with 20 years of Google special sauce.
Google's infrastructure is all in house, they don't even buy servers. They assemble all their stuff from commodity parts for a fraction of what we will even pay Oracle for their sh--ty cloud. They have more compute and data in the tip of their pinky than we will ever have. They can mine more data at a lower cost than us, which means the folks who want to buy the data will get a better deal from Google.