I’m not trying to make a prediction, just express a perspective. Google definitely seems to have taken on more capital expenditure around AI than they should have, but apparently not as bad as Microsoft or Oracle. It will be interesting to see if Apple actually has the best long-term strategy around AI.
I kinda feel like google had already given up on search, which (note that gemini said) is less than 50% of their current revenue. Their search had turned into such spammy and scammy crap that I personally gave up on it a few years ago and actually pay for a decent search service now. If didn’t even check if google offered a decent paid search service because I just don’t care to support big tech anymore and I especially don’t trust google. That being said, google has other revenue streams, such as google docs and YouTube (other than costs, it’s hard to see how AI will harm with revenue there). They also could find a way to insert adds into AI output once that concept gets more normalized, which could put them in a "great" position. It seems that the more one uses google AI, maps, mail, and so forth, the more “personalization” information they would have about that individual. It’s not clear whether or to whom they sell such information, including one or more governments. If they do a decent job at AI, they seem to be in a good place to sell it as a service, possibly around existing services such as docs or to help sell docs. They could benefit from other techniques to monitize their AI investments, including renting out compute capacity. I doubt they’ll catch up with Anthropic around coding specifically and I don’t think they’ll push customers away as hard as Microsoft does.
Again, no predictions, just perspectives, and I should state that I'm not in this field and just reading a subset of the resources available. Also, I'm not certain that any of these companies are disclosing their complete and true strategies. I wouldn’t count google out of any tech race that they don’t give up on their own.
