I think the change in sentiment is that the sky is no longer the limit for Alphabet. Meta lost that notion big time, and Amazon is so so too. Apple and Microsoft might still be in the "sky is the limit" category, or at least in another category than the other 3.
Microsoft successfully transitioned into cloud computing with Azure, Office 365, and Teams. They dramatically improved their image among developers/open source with WSL, Typescript, VS Code, and their GitHub acquisition. Now it seems they caught Google completely off guard with respect to AI productization.
Is this the driver?
Microsoft as IBM is a horribly outdated take.
Because of MS, they helped me love desktop apps again: VSCode, Outlook, Edge, and the ever so controversial Teams.
The fasting growing cloud? 6% in five years after pouring in billions now they need to start charging what it costs. The more unprofitable of the cloud vendors.
Chrome is still the most popular free browser. Not sure that matters as much as it once did.
The data they collect via Chrome, plus their ad network, makes Chrome part of their money printing machine.
So market share I think helps them here.
Also it doesn't matter what any of us think, it matters what the market thinks as in where does the stock price go.
AWS made 5.2B last quarter.
Google is selling at cloud at a loss to gain market share while it's biggest competitor is raking in profit. Sure, you can burn money and gain market share. But would anyone pick Google for a long term partner on any product? I sure as hell wouldn't. They have a tendency to simply discard products left and right. The support is non existent. Why tie yourself to such an unreliable partner?
I guess this site could be of interest to some, to have a look at some of the products: https://killedby.tech/
Google has a separate site here as well: https://killedbygoogle.com/
Microsoft also has a site like that: https://killedbymicrosoft.info/
I tried looking up one for Amazon or AWS projects, but only unrelated news articles came up.
I don't really have a horse in the race, though, since all three of the big platforms (and others like Oracle Cloud) are outside of my price point and all my personal projects run on smaller simple VPS providers. From what I can tell, there is not a single large corporation out there with the commitment to never kill a product of theirs and support everything in perpetuity.
If growth rates continue, in 5 years, it's on pace to be one of the most hundred profitable companies in the world...
Search hovers around ~90% for the last several years: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
Google Cloud is growing faster than Azure & AWS for the last few years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/967365/worldwide-cloud-i....
Cloud was at ~4% market share 5 years ago, now it's at ~10%...
Android is the only major product doing somewhat poorly, and this is mostly due to Apple just completely crushing it with the iPhone.
I get that Google is the company everyone loves to hate, but the sky isn't falling on this company yet.