Google might be a mess now, but they have time. OpenAI and Anthropic are on barrowed time, Google has a built in money printer. They just need to outlast the others.
I think Gemini is really built for their biggest market — Google Search. You ask questions and get answers.
I’m sure they’ll figure out agentic flows. Google is always a mess when it comes to product. Don’t forget the Google chat sagas where it seems as if different parts of the company were making the same product.
In the "Intelligence applied" section, where they show the comparison animations, they are shown using a non-optimal UI.
There is not enough time to read the text, see old animation, and see new animation. Better would have been to keep the same animation on repeat, so that people have unlimited time to read the text and observer the animations.
Also, it jumps from example to example in the same video. Better would have been to show each separately, so that once user is done observing one example at their own pace, they can proceed to the next.
As a workaround, I had to open the video (just the video) in a new tab, pause once an example came up, read the text, then rewind to the start of the animation to see the old animation example, then rewind again, then see the new animation example, and then sometimes rewind again if I wanted to see the animation again. Then, once done with the example, I had to forward to the next example and repeat the above process again.
Somewhere along that process, they lost me.
Where Google has fallen down is trying to productize new things. Imagine if Apple had Google's software prowess, or Google had Apple's ability to conceptualize a complete product.
Writing is on the wall that orders of magnitude fewer people will be going to google.com or using an interactive Google search in the next 5 years though.
Sure, once they figure out how to count to three.
counterpoint: which service or product is immune to this statement?
Historically it was the opposite; OpenAI was yolo and Gemini overly cautious to the point of severely limiting utility