Economic Value of Learning and Why Google Open Sourced TensorFlow

What does Google know that the other 99.99% of organizations don't? I don't roam the hallowed hallways of Google or have access to any insider secrets as to their business plans and future business models, but it sure does make one contemplate why they would give away the very engine that fuels their obscenely-lucrative search business. You see, Google uses Machine Learning and Deep Learning to fuel its Personal Photo App (it auto-magically groups your photos into storyboards or collages), recognize spoken words (natural language processing), translate foreign languages (handy for me as I frequently travel internationally), and serve as the basis for its search engine. Arguably, Machine Learning and Deep Learning are the foundation for everything that makes Google money, and TensorFlow is the foundation for those Machine Learning and Deep Learning efforts. So why would Google open source TensorFlow and make it accessible to everyone – researchers, scientists, machine learning experts, students, and even its competitors?