Between this and the payments to Apple, I wonder where Google would be if they invested another $30b into competing more aggressively... I guess these payments make sense if you believe you can't effectively deliver something good with that money.
Or, if you believe that your product is already as good as money can buy (i.e. the brightest and highest paid engineers, with an unlimited R&D budget, and the law of the Mythical Man-Month as an upper constraint on team size), then the money is better used elsewhere to help the product. I don't know if this is what they believe, but it seems quite plausible to me.
Therefore putting cash into this kind of thing makes sense, but the bigger question is still, why isn't Google just doing better in these non-search categories it's competing in?
But more seriously, this is such a bizarre take. All these megacorps have effectively infinite resources to play with, they can't all win at everything. Apple and Samsung have the leading phones, and have lot of money, expertise and brand loyalty to help them maintain that lead. Conversely, Microsoft poured tens of billions and like a decade into phones and didn't even get past "viable". You've probably even forgotten Amazon's and Facebook's mobile phone forays.
Maybe it all boils down to a failure in comms though, Apple is just as much 'the iPhone' company as Google is 'the search company' when it comes to profits, yet Google can't shake the stigma that they can't innovate and deliver.
Would they have so many "most used" if they did not pay to be the default in so many places?
How much of their success is due to merit of the application, service, system, etc. versus "stacking the deck" by paying to be default or preventing competition?
They could and should absolutely be putting more into Android. Android has historically been about choice, but it's more and more becoming a clone of iOS. I recently had a need to record phone calls, something I did with ease ten years ago when I was battling with car insurance people, and it is damn near impossible now in 2023. Root in general is a pain in the ass. If I was terrified of the possibility of poweruser options, and wanted to be locked down and led by the nose to use my device in the exact way prescribed by the overlords, I'd be using iOS! I'm guessing they consider the market pretty saturated and aren't very motivated. Some good old fashioned competition would do wonders.
I don't think for one second that this is what Google believes, as evidenced by their collusion to suppress wages[0]
[0] https://time.com/76655/google-apple-settle-wage-fixing-lawsu...
These payments aren't towards being the default, it's to ensure that search itself does not get replaced by a different paradigm.
You could argue that it is not a coincidence that the likes of Siri stagnated for so long, while we saw the rise of LLMs effectively resurrecting it elsewhere.
So it is the quality of the open web itself that has been declining, and search is just reflection of that. LLM doesn't solve that, unless the LLM has access across the silos.
LLMs (at runtime) and LLM mills (during training) have nothing to gain from restricting themselves to the open web. This is in contrast to Google, who is in the business of selling links to information and not information in itself.
I've had many Nexus and two Pixels (the 5, and 8 now), with an Essential Phone in the middle, hard to beat during the last $220 fire sale.
To me, Google never had a serious hardware strategy. It's improved and keeps improving though, the features getting a lot of focus (like the camera performance) are good, they finally committed to 5 and now 7 years of software updates, the Pixel lineup is sold in an increasing number of countries (Google could still do a much better job here, just sell your hardware ffs). Eventually they'll move to their own in-house SoC, and hopefully Samsung modems won't suck forever.
But when I see something like the Pixel tablet sold at such ridiculous price in most countries, I truly wonder what's going on, it's like some people at Google explicitly want to fail.
Even from a technical perspective, I'd argue Google outpaces OpenAI. BERT beat GPT-2 and GPT-Neo, T5 and t5-flan bench well against GPT-3, and GPT-4 is so large and wasteful that it's not worth competing against. Relative to the rest of FAANG, Google honestly seems like the only company that actually knows how to use and deploy AI practically. Everyone else is trying to play catch-up with a proprietary competitor and/or pay an unsustainable sum to be king-for-a-day.
I bet Microsoft can afford to spent unsuspecting amounts for way long than ‘a day’. At a certain point due to cheaper hardware and improved optimization GPT-N might become sustainable, by then their competitors might have issues closing the mile wide gap they have to MS/OpenAI.
They have capital, they have free cash flow, they can attract talent, but often they completely fail to compete effectively in new categories they enter.
One problem that Google might have is that their criteria for success has become to high. Products has to make billions within a short time frame, but they aren't willing to make the same kind of investments in ensuring that success as a company like Apple is. The AppleTV, or even the Apple Watch would have been killed or sold off had they been Google products. Why they keep the Pixel I have no idea, maybe it is in fact part of some larger plan.
I personally don't believe that at all (that the extra gains will be spent on development) but the possibility exists.