It's interesting to read the comments and then look at Slack vs Microsoft Teams. Slack was the clear leader in at-work group messaging, people thought it was a run away success and then Teams basically obliterated it. Google has huge scale distribution on all levels. When the time comes they'll put out the right product and it will scale to millions upon millions of users within a very short time span. The quality of the experience will also be vastly superior. Google's at a stage where they're not about making speculative moves or putting out half baked products because it's just not worth it. That's the nature of big companies with a brand, reputation and scale. Look at Apple, you're not seeing terrible product launches, they take their time and do it right. Honestly, I don't think this is a one horse market, many players will be in the game, just like other markets. They don't need to be #1 and probably won't be, but it will be a quality product that either drives a new search format or a revenue stream for other things e.g plugs into services you already use, increases usage, adoption and costs.

Could they acquire an OpenAI competitor, maybe, but anti-trust is a pretty big problem right now. It's most likely that we're just going the route of everyone copying the form factor and whoever has the best experience/data and speed of response wins.