- dart lost to typescript on web

- angular lost to react

- tensorflow looks like currently loosing to pytorch - seems like google got bored and more development is for JAX, Keras wrapper [0]

- IMHO flutter will loose with react-native or kotlin compose multiplatform - compare github insights for details

Meta on the other hand kickstarted open source Llama community. In this situation it's hard to bet on Gemmini or Gemma as 3rd party developer considering google projects kill records. The only project they were really to bet on and invest for the long run without getting tired early on was Chrome and Android.

[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

i believe this trend is a result of management culture and performance metrics that attempt to measure "impact", and correlate pay and promotions along those measures.

It's the same reason why google products die when they don't reach mega-success (thus products getting killed off in spades recently).

Nobody wants to be doing maintenance on projects started by somebody else - so as soon as the lead visionary leaves for better pastures, that project gets languished, and whoever takes over it cannot use it to generate promotion worthy impact.

That's a big problem, a "support guarantee" could really help things.

Google is now a AD platform with a search engine to sell stuff.

I hoped a little bit in Fuchsia, it was the last one for me.

NOW?! They were that for the past 20 years mate.

I noticed today that they get rid of filters in the "products/shopping" tab

FFS

Their search could die and they’d still be the biggest advertising player on the internet by leaps and bounds.

https://www.voronoiapp.com/business/Breaking-down-Googles-Q1...

Facebook makes much more money than 19% of Google.

Edit: And I wonder why I got downvoted for being right, many here just blindly believe that Google gets their money from ads on third party sites when most of it comes from search.

> Their search could die and they’d still be the biggest advertising player

Nothing about their worth or whatever.

Google ad manager is the cornerstone of pretty much all internet advertising.

Even if you don’t buy ads from Google directly, somewhere in your ad pipeline is google ad manager.

That money is a part of Googles revenue, so there isn't as much there as you might think. Maybe you mean there is quantity there but advertisers doesn't pay as much for it as they would for Facebook or Google search ads, then yeah that is possible, but normally in a market segment you count big players by revenue and not numbers sold.

On the other hand there's zero desire at Google to try and build the best phone. They have conceded that to Apple a long time ago.

No desire to be number one in Cloud. They are fighting for number 3 spot.

They are the Xerox of AI with a full stack solution. If they had the drive they would be HYPING THE SHIT out of TPU and making it the best solution to run all the real workloads people have.

Guess what. On average a Googler even still today with low bar to entry is probably 10 IQ points higher than average Amazon or Microsoft or Apple. But no; no drive.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...

porn is added by yours truly.

Porkbun is my go to registrar now. And I switched my email to Migadu.

saying this as someone who used to work for enom, if that matters.

Did it really come down to some PM not wanting to do registrar paperwork?

I could understand deprecating Google Domains for B2C, but for B2B?! What went through their heads?

Meta's performance reviews are also heavily weighted for measurable impact.

I think that the reason why it's beating Alphabet in so many fronts is team culture. Most new product teams are small and have a reasonably flat hierarchy. It's easy to make impact that's both effective and measurable, and the amount of engineering time working in "useless work" is minimised.

Schmidt still takes the gold medal in my estimate for destroying a company he ran by not understanding how the business actually works (as CEO of Novell he decided to screw their channel partners not understanding that the channel relationships were the company's entire moat against Microsoft).

But it's not like Schmidt had any strategy to bypass the network installers. He just decided to screw them hard so he could make a quarter look good, which lead inevitably to them deciding not to be Novell's low-paid salesforce anymore, which lead rapidly to the vastly premature collapse of the business.

Initially, at least, Microsoft was much a preferable OEM. Better docs (MSDN), better tech support, more profitable, etc.

(Microsoft also made embraced application servers. Spearheading switch from workgroup to client/server. But that's another chapter.)

> tensorflow looks like currently loosing to pytorch - seems like google got bored and more development is for JAX, Keras wrapper

Well, TensorFlow doesn't "look like currently losing", it has already lost since a long time. I haven't seen a decent paper release code in TensorFlow in years, and all the references I see to TF online are job posts from "older" companies (to the point that, if you are looking for a job in data science, seeing TF mentioned in the job post is kind of a red flag of a place you don't want to be).

That said, I am quite certain that this has only a small impact on why Google is losing terrain, and even on why it is behind in AI (which is also debatable: narrative aside, Gemini is not that much lacking behind competitors). Certainly if TensorFlow + TPUs turned out to be better than PyTorch + GPUs they would have had a lead to start from, but if that was so important, Meta or NVIDIA would have created the first LLM, not OpenAI.

Simply, sometimes stuff happens, you can't predict it all.

Tensorflow is a symbolic framework, which is less intuitive to work with for most people than the Pytorch. Not to mention the errors Tensorflow generates are more annoying to debug (again more an issue with the fact that it's symbolic than any lack of effort on part of Google)

Google tried to fix it by introducing an eager mode in Tensorflow but by then it was too late.

And the fix was "new major version with a fundamentally different programming paradigm"

But it turns out when your users are irritated with your product, and you tell them to change to a fundamentally different programming paradigm, the new programming paradigm they change to might not be yours.

Google seems to have a deep-seated distrust for programming language theory, as well as a deep-seated distrust for its users. This combination produces awkward software and APIs that ignore modern PLT and take a "Google knows best" approach.

Every meeting I attend with them has one or two engineers[1] struggling to breathe because there are at least 6 or 7 sales people, relationship managers or other non-doing non-technical middle-management spreadsheet jockeys stealing all the oxygen in the room.[2]

I can only imagine how terrible it is to work there given that these folks have all the power internally. I've genuinely never dealt with an organization that seems this bad.

[1] who are usually pretty good.

[2] It's an internal joke at my enterprise how every meeting another new person from google shows up introduces themselves as head of some other microscopic facet of the corporate relationship.

Typescript is a superset of javascript, Dart isn't (though it transpiles). Flutter implements its own widgets, react native controls native widgets.

This is a weird take. It might pertain to 2020 during Covid when Meta encouraged remote working, but it's not like that anymore. Interviews were always leetcode focused so nothing changed there.

Meta is an interesting comparison because the performance culture has historically been way tougher than Google (sans Covid years). It's quite a shock for a lot of Xooglers who join. One Xoogler at Meta who told me they only used to work 4-6 hours a day at Google. That is basically impossible in Meta - you have to constantly prove your value and the perf bar is high.

I think Google is changing now though and I wouldn't be surprised at all to see them adopt Meta/Amazon style perf cultures in the future.

Source: I work at Meta, and have close friends at Google.

All these asshole managers like Schmidt.

Have you ever worked in another industry? Retail? Healthcare? Trades? Public safety?

Tech is a walk in the park, relatively speaking.

All of them have the same thing going on. Hell, healthcare has even formalized it in some cases into 24+ hr shifts for residents.

In all these industries, there are areas where it isn’t a thing, and areas where it is absolutely a thing. But they do (often) get paid overtime. Not residents though.

Whether "work from home" is the cause or not, I think he is absolutely right on the latter part of his sentence, that contrary to startups, almost no individual at Google has the fire or drive in them to play to win. If you are young and you go work at Google, they will beat that fire out of you very quickly. "Work" from home is just one way that nobody-cares attitude is manifesting itself. [BTW, that attitude is by no means exclusive to ICs; definitely leadership has it as well, perhaps more so.]

Yes, that's why you go to large megacorps. I wouldn't go to Oracle, IBM, Google, Facebook, MS, etc. etc. if I had a "huge fire or a drive to win". Honestly, I go there because I wanna work 5 hours a day (less if possible) and have a stable career.

If I want to work 9-12h a day, give me an upside. None of these huge megacorps will reward that.

If I'm the lead of a Goog project that becomes a hit, do I get $10M bonus? Of course not. I get a pat on the back and something to put in my packet for the next promotion interview.

So you're absolutely right, but the problem is not in people. It's in the way the system's designed.

Seems like you might want to consider the finance industry.

If you make something important 5% faster, you bet you are getting a few years worth of salary as bonus.

The risk/compliance teams would be interested in your strategy.

This can be done by contributing substantially to the language standard, a compiler, etc etc.

Or you could learn COBOL!

Isn't that strange?

One important blue collar worker can help a limited number of people at a time, usually one.

One line of code can affect what billions of people are doing.

System was designed by the people, more specifically people with ability to make decisions a.k.a management

There might not have been one person making all the wrong decisions. But more like lots of small wrong decisions, but it doesn't reduce the fact that it is management that is always responsible for the state of affairs.

I agree that many want the stable and low hours career but how many people at these big companies are getting that? I mostly see it as a FOB farm and trying to overwork the overwhelming majority of workers at these companies. For all the stories of people working five hours a day and making $400k/yr - I hear many more working 60 hour weeks.

> If I want to work 9-12h a day, give me an upside. None of these huge megacorps will reward that.

I don’t really see startups rewarding that much either. Maybe it’s more rewarding if you’re a founder. I’m speaking as someone who has been an early engineer at startups and gone public with them. I still don’t see them as that rewarding unless you’re a founder.

Also, incentives aren’t the same. You might make a great thing but unless you’re near the top - you’re probably not going to get properly rewarded regardless of how good your ideas and whatnot are. People at the top will steal credit because that’s what they do. (“Look at how good I am at hiring/managing/inspiring/etc.”)

This is absolutely right. For every senior person in a glamorous role at a FAANG making $400k/yr, there are probably five less senior, less glamorous people making $150k/yr, grinding away trying to justify a promotion to the next level. The people posting to HN that their brother's girlfriend's nephew's roommate makes $400k think that's every FAANG developer.

Levels gives a clear direction that if you work at big tech as an engineer, you'll usually make decent to good income. Whether it's worth the WLB/PIPing/misery is what you have to figure out.

There's a reason a ton of the people at FAANG are all on H1B. It's not a lack of domestic talent - it's a lack of Americans willing to be worked that hard and go through insane hoops to get said jobs. (justifiably so btw) I think a large reason why most of the crowd at FAANG is way more autistic than average is because autists can put up with such insane working conditions/hoops. Either cause they enjoy it or because they just have something about them that allows them to ignore it. I'm not even going to get in on how so many people in SV are also on various stimulants.

System incentives,management,and staff hiring all form a feedback loop which sets culture and performance.

Google has severe cultural problems and the responsibility for that should be assumed by the leadership.

That said, it is up to the individual to work at Google or not, so it's not like they are a self-selecting population of maximally driven people. At least not the recently-joined folks.

By and large, Google is branded as the company people choose to go and coast maximally recently.

People love to talk about how capitalism (or free market) solves the tragedy of the commons, but it actually doesn't. The only way to solve it is to make people care about commons by giving them a say in managing it, i.e. socialism.

They are by far our best bet at solving large coordination problems through price signals. Even though they are far from perfect. I do believe that free markets require capitalism (i.e. profits go to the owner of the capital rather than those who do the labour). But nothing there is against strong regulation, collective bargaining, and anti-trust. Nor is there anything about companies being soley beholden to their shareholders.

Also, 'free' markets can only exist with a whole bunch of regulation, and even then some markets (e.g. emergency care) can never be free.

You can't influence the course of the company (hence the 'beating drive out of you' comment I made). I am not root-causing the issue and putting the blame on leaf-level folks, just describing it. Quite the contrary.

I was riding a gBike (single-speed for those who aren't familiar with one) ~10 years ago with my friend and I told him this bike is a perfect representative of Google's culture. No matter how hard you pedal it goes the same speed.

There do exist worker-managed companies under capitalism, they consistently underperform. There also exist (and have existed) worker-managed companies under various forms of socialism, those were an utter disaster (for the workers themselves, for the environment, for business productivity, for overall societal welfare, for human dignity, the list goes on).

> How can you have "drive to win" if you are just an employee of a company, and have no stake in it?

Bonuses, raises, equity.

Of course, according to a metric, how much money I can make out of an investment, without having to do any work, they underperform!

> There also exist (and have existed) worker-managed companies under various forms of socialism, those were an utter disaster

This is simply not true. Where it was a disaster, it was for the similar reason, workers didn't have the stake in the company.

> Bonuses, raises, equity.

Possibly but you have no say how these things get distributed, and they still are only a small portion of what the investors get.

> According to Virginie Pérotin's research which looked at two decades worth of international data, worker cooperatives are more productive than conventional businesses. Another 1987 study of worker cooperatives in Italy, the UK, and France found "positive" relationships with productivity. It also found that worker cooperatives do not become less productive as they get larger. A 1995 study of worker cooperatives in the timber industry in Washington, USA found that "co-ops are more efficient than the principal conventional firms by between 6 and 14 percent".

Coops don’t have the same incentive structure as external-investor-beholden corporations, so they don’t pursue “growth at all costs”, but rather survival at all costs (job preservation), and then growth where appropriate (pie expansion).

It’s kind of like the trade off between authoritarian regimes and democratic regimes. One is fast but flimsy, the other is slow but robust.

To start a business you need capital, if you have enough on your own, you do not need a coop, much more difficult to convince a group of people to risk together unless they’ve all had previous experience with one another.

> Bonuses, raises, equity.

And significant ones, too. None of this "Hey, you saved the company $1M, here's a $500 bonus!" bullshit.

I once had a founder privately lament to me the this employees don't play to win, and don't "treat the company as if they owned it," and it took all my willpower not to fire back with: "Dude, you're the sole shareholder with 100% of the equity, what do you expect?"

See problem, fix problem. Don't bring it to management. They are just going to tell you to fix it and then take the credit. Protesters confuse me, they are appealing to the cause of the problem for help and redress.

It blows me away how people bathe themselves in hierarchy. Its almost like oxygen to them. Of course, many anarchists become authority figures because of their raw affinity for getting shit done without asking for permission to think.

Great theory when it's just a little quip. Not so great when it comes time to put into practice.

I have a problem, one of my coworkers is being lazy, he isn't cleaning up after himself and his mess is becoming a general hazard (slipping, fire.) I try to tell him to fix it but he's not concerned about the risks and tells me to fuck off. I can clean the mess myself, sometimes, but I have my own work to get done and he can create new mess a lot faster than I can clean it. I could try to organize other workers into a lynch mob.. err... I mean struggle session- wait no... I mean "intervention", but this asshole isn't responsive to social pressure and the people I work with don't have the stomach for violence...

You know what solves this neatly? Going to management. And if that fails, going to government regulators.

No one with such a drive would stay in, or even go to Google, neither any GAFAM-like corp. Those have been the establishment for 10+ years now.

A large corporation cannot seriously pretend to encourage their employees to "play to win" when it is structuring itself against that precisely.

The bigger the corp, the slower, duller and more rigid it becomes _unless_ someone at the CxO level actively fights against it in a opinionated manner (which still doesn't often register well with boards and major shareholders).

It may be sad, it's quasi a law of physics for corporations. If you have that kind of fire in you, go first hunt into to the woods, don't go to the factories.

I am not so sure it's that cut and dry. Even among the FANG, the desire to play to win is vastly different. I'd say Apple still has that mojo. Facebook also more than Google although that ship went south post-2018, I'd say.

Tesla comparatively underpaid and overworked people but I think they play to win.

SpaceX even more so. Folks who work hard there are excited to do so because they feel their work matters.

There are non-monetary structural features of large corporations that make them different on that metric. I think the desire at the top to want to win in the first place is critical, plus the autonomy at the lower level to ship cool ideas without much roadblock or dilution of contribution among way too many people.

I don't agree, but there are challenges at Google that don't exist in other large companies.

Google's monorepo along with the 'bottom up' driven culture means that to enact any non trivial change, you need many sign-offs, which means an iron clad design doc, and either you have to be brave enough to make huge disparate changes across other teams codebasse, OR to wait multiple quarters to have respective teams execute.

Sometimes this is awesome, and it means you can do really complex things over the course of a year.

Often, it just means experimenting with non trivial changes takes 3x longer than it would at say Amazon or more silo'd companies.

IMO this came first and is a driver for people stepping back and defending their boundaries with Google. Most of the eng I know just cared about their work (some driven by the ladder, for sure). Google made it difficult and put a bad taste in people's mouths about "work[ing] like hell". Meanwhile, on the startup side that I've seen, people work a lot but in much more harmonious way.

Yep, he is a great leader! :) /s

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/12/technology/eric-schmidt-a...

By who? By what metric? That is a much shallower claim.

I would wager the guy blaming their middling AI development on "work life balance" was not well liked.

If it's true? It's a quote from the talk itself.

> it misses the entire point of the parent comment

Not really. I would say cheating on your wife with your PR executive is extremely bad for morale and an all around leadership failing. Just because sex is involved doesn't make it tabloid fodder. I can't just punch a coworker and call it "my personal life."

More importantly, you're ignoring the part of the comment that said he was extremely well liked, which was the baseless claim I responded to. You can say that's not the point of the comment, but that's just because acknowledging it weakens the argument.

Sorry, didn't mean to be unclear - my "even if that's true" was referring to the assertion that Schmidt wasn't well-liked, not your quote.

Yes, he was married. Yes, maybe a serial cheater. Or an awful marriage. Or a great one. I have no idea. But I don’t care?

Dating a coworker (or many) when you are the boss and married is exactly what a sexual predator do. Being a predator doesn't mean he "predate" on every walking thing.

Dating someone at work doesn’t automatically make you a sexual predator. That’s an absurd statement. Plenty of relationships start that way, and sometimes one of them is a boss, and companies have processes for these situations because they happen and the majority of situations are not due to predation.

Are you going to pretend we are not talking about the CEO here? CEOs dating subordinates at work are sexual predators, yes.

However, not every CEO that dates a subordinate is a sexual predator. Again, that is an absurd statement; life is never that black and white. Sometimes, people meet and fall in love regardless of their lot in life. Stating that anytime that happens and one person happens to be a CEO instantly makes that person a sexual predator is not based in any kind of reality.

A CEO that abuses their power or engages in any kind of non-consensual relationship is a different story.

I agree it’s generally a bad idea, because of perception, favoritism, the power imbalance, and a dozen other reasons. But it being a bad idea doesn’t necessarily imply that the CEO is a sexual predator, either.

Sometimes even people in power care about consent.

And sometimes people in power are predators. That happens too. Maybe even more often; I don’t have stats.

I’m not defending Schmidt. I have no idea about him or his sexual proclivities, nor do I know the details about any of his personal relationships. Neither do you. He may be a monster! But dating someone at work isn’t the thing that makes him one.

And yes, you are defending not only Schmidt but maybe yourself too?

Now that we’ve moved solidly from discussion to ad hominems, have a nice day and a nice life.

> why would his spousal relationships make him a bad leader?

How can you trust someone that can't even keep their vows to their wife?

If you are OK with serious liars as leaders, thats fine for you I guess. Definitely not OK for me. Albeit for purely work performance, most of us can turn off our moral radar temporarily, mortgages ain't gonna pay for themselves with just good honest heart. But that's not a definition of leader, quite far away from that actually.

I would not be so eager to cast the first stone.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUrMSK8XWFc

https://qz.com/work/1326942/sergey-brin-started-google-with-...

I think Google is starting to become that.

What is not really about piyuv’s comment?

> There are places to hide in these companies for non-productive workers.

And that is where the leadership issue lies. Either because they can’t identify them, or can’t motivate them, or can’t fire them. Who is responsible for doing that? I don’t think it is the janitors. It is the leadership, very much.

There's no incentive to excel. Either you'll get laid off anyway or someone else will take credit for your work.

Might as well just coast. The severance is quite good, so there's not even much motivation to quit, better to wait to be laid off.

Well... count me in !

There's nothing like a team sitting together working towards a common goal. WFH can't duplicate it.

Now, if you're a dev who gets well defined specs given to you by someone who's done the work to collaborate with others to get those specs to you, then WFH is fine. For any other role, WFH is simply worse for the business.

I think on HN, it's skewed more towards pro-WFH because a lot of devs here do in fact get specs handed to them and they just work on the specs and occasionally answer/ask questions on Slack.

On the other hand, nearly every other role is way worse WFH. For example, a product manager has to build relationships with other departments and teams, persuade other leaders, talk to customers (usually better in person). There are a ton of communication that needs to happen and often, it's simply better in person than on Slack/Zoom. Writing the spec is the "easy" part.

Where there is a disconnect between the HN dev crowd and businesses is that from the HN dev's perspective, WFH is fine for them and it works well. They're not losing much. But for everyone else in the business, it's much less efficient. A business cannot let their devs WFH and everyone else must be in the office. It's simply unfair. Therefore, businesses recalled everyone back in the office so it's fair.

A HN dev is always confused about why businesses want them back in the office. They make up weird conspiracy theories like how executives own real estate so they need sabotage their own company to increase their real estate value. In reality, writing code is a unique task that can be done well at home. But every other role in the company suffers. Even in the long run, a software dev will suffer while WFH due to the lack of relationships and mentorships.

If I had to guess, Google's problem is probably that they created ephemeral written text as the primary solution for communication. It is neither good for speed nor good for documentation as a consequence.

Was this only to avoid the cost and annoyance of legal discovery, or was there some other reason? It seems obviously bad.

What would that be? They do everything on Signal?

But many others cannot.

This feels like a generalization which isn't true across the age spectrum. I manage two products teams which are on opposite ends of the spectrum. One which has been working for more time than I have (10-20 years) and another which got their first jobs right before the pandemic so most of them have never worked outside hybrid settings. Both teams work on the same complexity and produce similar products (model optimizations mostly). These are not skunk works teams either, they are coming up with new models for lithography machines. These products run on most semiconductor fabs in the world.

I observe the younger team is way better than anyone else at remote work. Even the other more senior teams in my department. They are in fact the more social team, sometimes even I can't keep up with their in jokes. I'm not surprised, most of these people grew up with the internet (I had some teenage years without it). Many of their personal relationships are also online.

To put it crudely, if you find WFH disconnecting its a skill issue.

Yeah, like fairness is important in business. Let's publish everyone salaries in the company and let's talk about fairness after that.

Fairness is not important to businesses - it's important to people (employees of the company). The other people aren't blind. They see devs being able to WFH but they can't. They're not going to like that.

They're gonna need to put up more money to get people back in the office then. Maybe even get rid of the open office bullshit. Remember when everyone actually had offices with actual doors?

Not only are people choosing the WFH job over the in office job given the same salary and benefits, but they'll likely choose a less-paying WFH job. Your in-office job pay needs to overcome both the convenience and getting-people-to-change-jobs taxes now. Otherwise you are getting people desperate for a job or that aren't skilled enough to land a WFH job.

So it's simple: you ask for more, you pay more. We know Schmidt's comment "Google decided that work life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning." is just trying to get more out of workers for no additional pay. Convincing people to work harder with words only costs time.

But companies aren't doing that. They're going the opposite direction and making return to office a threatening and oppressive response. Then they are also turning around and doing layoffs on top of it. Those who are good can go find a WFH job.

None of what the CEOs are doing coincide with what they are saying, and no one trusts them. Why would you actually want to do good work for a company/CEO like that? You'd just be saving them from themselves for no additional pay and a lot more driving to work!

It's more of a "not even wrong" statement. It's the kind of useless and reductive analysis poor leaders trot out from a position of personal frustration after failing to surmount the challenges involved in steering a complex, messy, human institution towards success.

It's incredible how consistently this maladaptive "everyone just work harder!!" mentality crops up among failed leadership in institutions of all kinds and sizes. In this respect, Schmidt is no different to the average frustrated restaurant owner, blaming his business failures on his staff's work ethic, "no one wants to work hard these days" and other copes.

Let's say we go ahead and assume that long grinds and 100% in-office attendance is the only way a successful and highly engaged team can look. Getting to that point would still require leadership to perform the actual hard work of creating the right conditions and incentives for that successful, engaged work to emerge. Shaking your fists at the air and saying "work harder people! we need to win!" doesn't cut it.

If Schmidt allowed himself to look more closely and reflect more deeply, he would realize that Google is and was full of extremely hard workers. But their "hard work" more likely took the form of navigating Google's political structures and chasing up internal promotions and prestige.

OpenAI had many Europeans like Sutskever who presumably were still allowed to focus on work.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/eric-schmidt-walks...

Google had a decade headstart on several AI unicorns tech and did nothing but write a paper and say "No you can't see the code, no you can't use the model, oh maybe here's a video of it working or at best a Google Labs project that shows a small fraction of its potential in a gimmicky way only available in the US and that stops working after a few months".

Google will forever be playing catchup from now, where they had such a massive headstart.

From talking to people who've worked/work at Google it sounds like a lot of the issues stem from too few employees dogfooding their products (especially hardware), and huge inertia to get anything off the ground/make large changes.

Add to that the lack of cohesive product direction (constantly deprecating and replacing messaging products as the main example) and you get Google.

My take is more Google having like a 80-90% share in search and browsers and email and phone os and online advertising probably wasn't too worried about dominating everything and perhaps a little worried about being criticized as a monopoly. Hence them open sourcing the transformers model and instead working on protein folding and the like.

Now they have competition in GenAI they can take it seriously without looking like monopolists there.

I don't know why we keep thinking about "GenAI" as a product. It's an enabling technology that may (or may not) be appropriate for building actual products.

We should be asking "Is our company winning in Search, or in Shopping, or in Chat, or in Developer Tools?" Not "Is our company winning in GenAI?" This is like saying "Is our company winning in Python use?" It makes no sense.