They are getting "beat badly" only if you read tech blogs and not their financial statements.
People forget. Who owns kaggle, who owns Google collab. Boggles my mind that people think a few AI upshot’s are going to reap all the value. Having a good AI companion that’s integrated into all your suite of tools. That’s the peak.
They’ll obviously retain some value. Google can integrate more easily and seamlessly with things people are using but that’s a competitive advantage not a moat.
Google’s trajectory has been from innovative market maker, to dominant market leader, to megacorp that has a strong established position that keeps them competitive and relevant, to legacy provider, to kind of irrelevant.
Google’s still strong and significant but every day they are less so.