I haven't followed that closely, but Gemini seems like a pivot based on ChatGPT's market success

Google is leading in terms of fundamental technology, but not in terms of products

They had the LLambda chatbot before that, but I guess it was being de-emphasized, until ChatGPT came along

Social was a big pivot, though that wasn't really due to Pichai. That was while Larry Page was CEO and he argued for it hard. I can't say anyone could have known beforehand, but in retrospect, Google+ was poorly conceived and executed

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I also believe the Nth Google chat app was based on WhatsApp success, but I can't remember the name now

Google Compute Engine was also following AWS success, after initially developling Google App Engine