And even if they did, there'd be five competing efforts, two would be good or at least decent, four would be deployed (not the best one though), and all would be replaced in three years.

None of them would work on-device, all would leak your data into the training set.

And two of them would be killed within a year and/or renamed/rebranded :)

And you forgot, if it was Google they would also all have their own internal chat service.

They did do that. Back in 2013-2015 or so. It was called Google Now, and it was a bit like magic.

It showed you contextual cards based on your upcoming trips/appointments/traveling patterns. E.g. Any tube delays on your way home from work. How early you should leave to catch your flight.

This alongside Google Inbox was among the best and most "futuristic" products.

I was glad to see today Apple implementing something similar to both of these.

But it was a decent new Google product, hence all the past tenses.

Google Then™

I've always been baffled why those two got canned. They were both really useful.

Canceling Google Inbox was when I started to move off their platform, it was their best product in years and finally got a handle on email chaos, and then they just killed it with no follow up, insane.

Google Now was actually a great idea, it was the only "social" media I actually understood.

No wonder they killed it.

Nothing compared to the fighting between whether the Office team or the Platform team at Microsoft owned the AI 'client' work, if we were back in the Windows 7 days.

There'd be constant sabotage.