My understanding is that Android existed not to pursue the goal of "winning," whatever that would have been, but to prevent Apple from running away with the show. Chrome was the same thing, though the competitor was Microsoft. Google Docs? Same thing, Microsoft again.

Google is good at building things 90% as good as they could be. For Gmail that 90% was leaps and bounds better than the web mail alternatives of 2004 which included…SquirrelMail.

Does Google care that you're switching to Hey or Safari or whatever has replaced Google Sheets? No. Are they going to buckle down at finish the last 10% of all of these products? No. Is that an opportunity for all of us reading this story? Yes.

One way to think of Google's products as the equivalent of Microsoft Write — or Apple's iWork. Google's platform is not Windows or Mac OS or iOS: it is the Internet. Google's products come free in the shrink-wrapped box when you drive to Egghead Software pick a copy of "Internet" up off the shelf.