To me what’s interesting is that MS smelled that it was a problem a while ago and pulled the plug before it ate a hole in their wallet but Amazon and Google keep plugging along ploughing money into a bottomless pit. Apple has a different play and looks like they are controlling their losses there quite well and may act as a slight loss leader for other products.
I can't fathom how they managed to spend so much on it, though. The product has been around for quite a while, as well, so it's not some initial ramp-up cost. $3B/quarter $10B/year? Wow.
Edit: Maybe things like this happen because there are various nerds who lead these products and are good at talking the businesspeople into funding it. Maybe this was only possible at the big tech growth stage while business wasn't that good at telling the value proposition. So end result, lots more engineers get paid which is great in my book :-)
