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Comment by closetheloopdev | Hacker News Reader

It seems Google has to play both offense and defense: competing against frontier labs' models while protecting search and ads. They also have to be mindful of not doing anything that could hurt their own search or ads. That seems harder than a frontier lab just doing offense on both models and search/ads.

Having said that, I think Google's moat is still strong with Cloud, Gmail, YouTube, Android, Chrome, etc.

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> Cloud, Gmail, YouTube, Android, Chrome

Cloud and gmail, I agree.

I don't think YouTube can survive if GenAI keeps going like this. Android, same, but on a different timescale and for different reasons. The Play Store (and all other app stores including Apple's) will also face problems from GenAI making apps (it already replaces my need to buy, but I'm weird and a software dev ("but I repeat myself")).

Not sure how big a moat Chrome really is? It's more like a sales funnel than a product itself, I think?

Gmail? Go try Fastmail. Gmail is worse today than it was 15 years ago.

Email addresses are like other contact information: people don't like having to update it (on either side of the link), it is sticky and people will keep sending you messages on the old address long after you stop sending from it, so it is a moat.

I connect to Gmail through Mail.app, not the website; Seems much the same to me now as then.

Mail.app is nice. Gmail.com still has no infinite scrolling.

As someone with kids, I still don't see a scenario with YouTube fading... What are you talking about? The video slop problem? If so, it's sort of like saying you don't think the Internet can survive if GenAI keeps going... which I've also heard but it didn't seem like that was where you were going...

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