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.

Google Drive is easily the worst of the desktop cloud storage options. It’s okay for Google Docs but not other files if that’s what you’re talking about..

I get 2TB (which I use) and AI Studio for $20, that's the best deal out there for me.

In a world where OneDrive exists?

I've used OneDrive across 3 companies with no problems.

Which one would you say is the best?

I'm back to Dropbox.

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

A lot of those are getting pretty close to 20 years ago.

This year:

chromeos is 17

android is 18

chrome is 18

google docs is 20

google translate is 20

In retrospect, it is wild how good/successful google was 17-20 years ago!

Few years ago, we had Google Bard, the ancestor of Gemini, which was supposed to be an AI LLM, and when you right-clicked the page, it was a fake page with hardcoded sentences in a .js file...

> was supposed to be an AI LLM

Are you claiming Bard wasn't an LLM???

None of them looks like their original form, none would survive without google’s enormous investment.

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

Deepmind was their worst acquisition ever. It is a vanity project that burns cash.

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

Neither does AWS and you can argue they aren't good but they're objectively successful, so it doesn't seem like a good metric.

Their API business model seems to be hope enough people accidentally go over free tier: $0 for the first 5000 monthly places lookups, $40 per 1000 after that

Im not sure what you consider successful. They've been struggling to get market share vs azure, and the product isnt that good. lots of rough edges, and piss poor support