I'm sure there were quite a few SGI, Sun, and IBM executives laughing at that amateurish thing called Linux...
However I question your level of confidence. The idea that a company is incapable of avoiding being disrupted is pretty dubious; now that disruption theory is well understood by all executives, it’s possible to take steps to avoid it.
For example, DeepMind is an Alphabet company, and they could push them to make chatbots profitable completely ignoring Google’s ad market. They could even transfer tech/people over and to give them a boost in productionizing their efforts.
They don't have to completely come up with a ChatGPT clone. They could do some of the following things:
- Enable some use cases on Google Search - for searches which are purely information based - above the search results. They already show such cards right now.
- Integrate it with Google Assistant. They already have excellent voice recognition devices. Assistant responding with generated answers, would be a game changer. You don't even have to type anywhere.