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There seems to be a lot of truth in that, but I think it's also maybe a little harsh as well.

Google hasn't needed to generate another monster revenue stream outside of ad sales, so it's possible that they never really tried all that hard (they've certainly killed it on the things that protect it, notably Android and Chrome). An utterly dominant position in how people access information that lasts for decades is probably "a hell of a drug".

For example, GCP is technically a really, really good cloud offering, maybe even the best for a lot of use cases (if you haven't looked at it lately, Cloud BigTable looks friggin amazing, I wish I'd had that database for the last ten years). They've obviously failed to parley that technical achievement into dominant market share, but maybe with the pressure on around search they get serious about whatever combination of pricing and marketing and customer support that gets them some serious market share.

YouTube has been quietly building their TikTok competitor into something I'm actually starting to waste some time on, they people who work on that are clearly really good at their jobs even if they started a little slow.

And on the LLM space, honestly I'm rooting for them: MSFT/OpenAI/ChatGPT need at least some competition and they are probably the best positioned to do so. Facebook/Meta is also doing this stuff in a more "open" way and that's keeping the pressure on around some competition too.

In general this LLM stuff is going to be a great thing long-term, but letting one company dominate both mindshare and marketshare is going to make that a much rougher road for society than if it's avoided.

Google senior management seems out of touch. It baffles me, since they got the money and the influx of talent. If you got those things, how you use it becomes the problem and that is all on management. Google might have become the old school corporate incapable of innovating or producing new modern business lines. having worked in those corporate environments, I can say that badly incentivized management can kill any giant of industry.

Its been going on for some time. Something that was once a joke in good jest AKA Google's graveyard, is now their actual reputation, and helping their strong big tech competitors when competing on new services.

gmail

yes "They've only ever done one thing well, from a business perspective - create a world class search algo, put it behind a minimalistic web page, and pay for it with ads. And they didn't even come up with that business model: they just did what the competition did, but made the idealistic-nerd version of it."