[timmmmmmay]

Google fucks up 90% of their products, why do you think Gemini is in the 10%?

[davnicwil]

well, it's basically existential, so the incentive is there to not only get it very right but also to limit the delta with how right anyone else gets it. The same can't really be said of the long tail of products Google have done.

Look to GCP as an example. It had to be done, with similar competitive dynamics, it was done very well.

Look to Android as another.

[mountainriver]

You must not know the stories of why GCP came to be.

It was an idea from the creators of Kubernetes and the execs at Google fought it the whole way

[sekai]

> well, it's basically existential, so the incentive is there to not only get it very right but also to limit the delta with how right anyone else gets it. The same can't really be said of the long tail of products Google have done.

I've yet to see anything that threatens Google's ad monopoly.

[xmprt]

Because Google has the money to build 10 different versions/iterations of Gemini and can essentially force one to work. They have most people's data and most people use them for mail/search/browser/maps as well.

In my opinion though this is a race to the bottom rather than a winner takes all situation so I don't think anyone is coming out ahead once the dust settles.

[stouset]

Google built ten different chat products, how did that go?

[kingkawn]

This was the same argument made for Google Wave and Google+ and both completely tanked

[infecto]

Agree. Look at how miserably MSFT has failed at integrating AI tastefully in their business.

Google makes money selling ads. Nothing else matters.

[measurablefunc]

They target those ads by ingesting as many signals as possible from as many input devices & sensors as they can possibly convince people to use. They make a lot of money from advertising b/c they have managed to convince the most number of people to give them as many behavioral signals as possible & they will continue to do so. They kill products only when the signal is not valuable enough to improve their advertising business but that's clearly not the case w/ AI.

[H8crilA]

Google has barely released a successful product in 20 years.

[Yizahi]

Depend on the definition of the "product". For example some banal cloud storage in which everyone competes. And it's an "old" product, despite being invisibly improved behind the scenes, just like at any other provider. Google has pretty competitive storage AND they are fully abusing Android integration for AND they have pretty good bundling of that storage with other products, including, you've guessed it - LLM Gemini. So say a person is not a professional user of LLMs like a developer burning tokens in a dozen accounts simultaneously. A person has a phone and eventually memory runs out, so he buys a one click Google storage for 4 bucks. And suddenly he has Gemini Pro included too. So why pay 20 bucks to Anthropic, when Google costs 1/5 of that AND has other stuff bundled too?

So maybe Google is lagging on truly new products (btw, does Gemini itself with its TPUs count as a new product? I'd say yes), but "old" products are entrenched enough to carry them and compete.

[asdfman123]

Google is good at buying existing products and scaling them, which is exactly what they did with DeepMind.

[Hamuko]

I thought that the likes of Android, Google Docs, Google Translate, etc. were fairly successful. Chrome and ChromeOS also seem fairly popular too.

[rvnx]

Google Cloud is good and successful. Except they can't implement billing hard caps, or pretend they can't.

[root_axis]

Because the product quality doesn't matter if the competition isn't making any money.

[port11]

0% interest to defend Big Don’t Be Evil, but success rates for most businesses, new or existing, are low. Succeeding at 10% of their ventures isn’t that bad, considering they add up to the trillions of dollars of valuation for big G.

[XorNot]

Persistence. Google has a lot more endurance then OpenAI does in this game.

The current AI market is going to destroy anyone who's specialized into it compared to having alternative revenue streams to subsidize it.

[moonlighter]

Does Alphabet/Google have any other significant alternative revenue streams though besides their ad revenue? And won't that decrease significantly the more people use AI tools for research than firing up a google web search? I find myself using Claude more and more doing web research and comparing products/reviews...without getting a single ad served up from Google.

[dlahoda]

google the only ai which invests mixing llm ai with real ai, and it seems work well.

[dlahoda]

race to the bottom. google in house cheaper inference hardware. anthropic buys it.

[longfacehorrace]

The conclusion Google is engaged in consumer capitalism is wild.

They're engaged in computing research and merely engage in consumer capitalism as a consequence of political and social constraints.

Products are a means to an end not the goal.

OpenAI and Anthropic are product companies and are more likely to fail like most product companies do as they will lack broad and wide depth.

Google has experience in design, implementation, and 24/7 ops with every type of SaaS there is. They can bin LLMs tomorrow and still make bank. Same cannot be said for OAI or Anthropic.

[afavour]

Do they though?

Google does things I hate with their products. But the money printing machine keeps going whrrr faster and faster.