Google parent Alphabet is the latest FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) company to post first quarter earnings as results season gets under way, reporting rapturous revenue and profit growth – while opening the taps on its capital expenditure, spending $7.7 billion in the period, up from $2.4 billion in Q1 2017. This inflated spend comes with the caveat Google is belatedly initiating an arms race with rivals in cloud technologies and consumer device markets – where Google has allowed an immense gap to form. YouTube is the third and final part of what Google CEO Sundar Pichai referred to as the company’s “big three areas” – yet YouTube is far more established than Google’s cloud and hardware businesses, a…