This is one of the reasons I believe Google will ultimately win the AI race once the VC funding tap runs dry. For all its breakthroughs, OpenAI lacks any fiscal discipline. Sam Altman seems convinced that as long as they’re delivering value and have a clear mission, the money will somehow take care of itself. That’s fine for now, but the music will stop playing one day.
When it comes to software engineering at scale, nothing beats Google. They already operate the world’s largest and (profitable) information index, they design their own chips, and employ the best engineers who know how to deliver massive systems cost-effectively. They can sustain large investment far longer than any other company simply because of how profitable all their existing businesses are. I just wish they would get their act together when it comes to product management.
I hold the exact same sentiment. The safest investment you can make in this AI race is Alphabet. The smaller players being wrapped up in this (CRWV, NOK, etc...) are going to get obliterated when the returns are not as good as previously thought. The bigger players will take a hit, but not as much as the small ones.
NVIDIA also seems like a risky bet given all the money they're passing around in circles to themselves via multi-billion dollar "investments"
> The safest investment you can make in this AI race is Alphabet.
From the technical/talent/funding side, I agree with you. With Alphabet, the real risk is that they lose interest/focus and kill (or pivot) products early. I don't really see that happening in the short term (considering the hype/investments/cash around AI) but maybe in the medium to long term if things start to get stale.
Even with that risk though, I agree with you.
The chances of Alphabet losing interest in AI are vanishingly small. Google (pre-Alphabet remaming) was the AI company before AI companies were called that.
> Google (pre-Alphabet renaming) was the AI company before AI companies were called that.
I disagree. They're an advertising/attention company.
The jury's still out on whether their AI offerings will compliment their existing business or will cannibalize it. And in the case that it cannibalizes the advertising business, will they undermine/kneecap it to protect that cash cow?
It's been a while since they've been the "don't be evil" and "organizing the world's information"-mission Google.
A company can be multiple things. Just like Apple is a Phone, Tablet, & General Computing Company
Agreed, but there's no denying that selling advertising is Google/Alphabet's primary business. And it's not even close.
Its the majority of their revenue, but the share is shrinking
Revenue attributable to advertising:
Q1: 74.1%
Q2: 74.0%
Q3: 72.5%
They didn’t lose interest in messaging when they cycled through half a dozen different apps but the problem was they were building products they wanted to exist rather than what users wanted. I’d worry about AI getting similar churn if PMs make their name by launching a new product rather than improving an existing one.
That makes sense framing it as a skepticism about Google Gemini (a single product) rather than their interest in a category (AI).
I'm less worried about them genuinely losing interest then Google outlasting their AI competition and then kneecapping their AI product to protect their cash cow.
The root comment was investor-centric, i.e. if you want to divert some investment towards AI, Alphabet is a smart bet.
Investors got great returns as Google churned messaging platforms, and this will likely be the case ad Google churns through AI products, or even entire architectures.
We did get good returns but that was because other units did very well. It’s not a given but still too likely that they’d botch AI products but still be profitable due to ad sales continuing to grow. I do think AI has better than average chances, though, because it seems to have scared their senior management enough to do their jobs: from outside, everything appears to radiate “this can’t fail” in a way they haven’t had since the 2000s.
If you look back at the dot com era, hardware companies did survive but weren't the financial "winners". Cisco is an example and a good comparison is Amazon - their bread and butter now is ecommerce, they dominate it and that was borne out of that bubble.
Alphabet also has massive market share with YouTube, solid cloud offerings, Waymo which already has driverless/unsupervised robot taxis and their old standby search which is morphing more into more AI answers when you throw questions in your browser.
Alphabet's P/E ratio is lower than the S&P 500's. Some may argue the S&P is mostly being held up by Tech and AI related companies so stock in Alphabet could be seen as undervalued and NVDIA as overvalued.
Hardware almost always ends up getting commoditized so investing in hardware companies for the long haul does carry maybe more risk than mainly software companies.
Man I remember when IBM was the safe bet.
I remember when SCO had an all hands meeting that they evaluated that linux wasn't a threat because SCO was the safe choice, the big player in UNIX on commodity hardware.
I don't think tech works that way.
NVIDIA also seems like a risky bet because Google has their own chips R&D. It's not just another data center buying NVIDIA's GPUs. BTW Apple is following suit regarding chips, don't know if at some point Apple will offer any cloud service or continue to work on their ecosystem only.
Beyond that there are a lot of new chip companies attacking the market: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45686790
This makes sense to me. Where I work our ai team set up a couple h100 cards and are hosting a newer model that uses up around 80GB vram. You can see the gpu utilization on graphana go to like 80% for seconds as it processes a single request. That was very surprising to me. This is $30k worth of hardware that can support only a couple users and maybe only 1 if you have an agent going. Now, maybe we're doing something wrong, but it's hard to imagine anyone is going to make money on hosting billions of dollars of these cards when you're making $20 a month per card. I guess it depends on how active your users are. Hard to imagine anthropic is right side up here.
But was that with batching? It makes a big difference. You can run many requests in parallel on the same card if you're doing LLM inferencing.
While Google has their own chips, they don't really have the market power there to buy up bleeding-edge manufacturing capacity.
Apple on the other hand... (though they're behind in other regards)
But they were just an example. They are many players arising. You can look at this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45746246 even <https://www.nextsilicon.com/> is not on that list.
I don't see a natural monopoly anymore.
It's not that easy. Tim is probably rubbing his hands until he can bring anthropic under the apple umbrella.
Might have missed the boat on that.
It’s everyone’s wet dream that Apple buys Anthropic, but I’m guessing their valuation now is already too high even for Apple. And why would Amazon let that happen?
It’s a solid match but not happening unless the AI market craters and Apple swoops in to buy them for vastly less.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple eventually decides that AI isn’t even a market worth existing in beyond some basic on-device tools.
They might say, have fun making single digit or negative profit margins on AI, we’ll sell subscriptions and iPhones and extended warranties.
All reports are that Apple isn’t really focusing on building their own server side models and is mostly just going to be a platform for other companies to fight over just like they said they don’t pay OpenAI anything for the current integration and Google pays them $20B+ a year to be the default search engine.
It makes no sense for Apple to waste money on having their own LLM when they are becoming commoditized - just chose the one that will give them the best deal.
I also think apple has put a lot of energy into providing on device hardware for this kind of stuff, like they have gone through a ton of iterations at this point on their own hardware that is also ai focused. so now they offer a lot of value in the mid to near future because if you can run ai on device why wouldn't you since you don't need to pay cloud costs anymore since users pay that for you by buying iphones.
So they’ll just die when Google has a seamless AI-first mobile experience where consumers just ask their Pixel to do X and it happens. Disruption comes for everyone, hardware isnt a moat
The issue is that Android won’t have an AI first experience where you depend on local inference because most Android phones being sold are cheap crappy devices and Android users don’t monetize.
But there is much more to a phone than “just doing stuff agentically”. Either way, you give way too much credit for Google to ever make a good end user product and be able to sell it. Google’s sells of pixels for a year are about the same number Apple sells in three weeks.
Apple’s hardware/ecosystem has been a most for 50 years.
Also Google is non existent in the country that has 1/5 of the worlds population.
Google broke my ability to set timers via voice (a core thing my phone used to do forever) for like a year. I no longer use that functionality on my phone (I can't trust Google not to break it, if it can't routinely work, it can't be part of my routine, and I personally don't enjoy cooking dinner twice after a long day).
Google replaced 'Google play the news' from playing news clips from sources I chose and trust, to an AI generated news feed that I have zero faith isn't hallucinated and from sources I have no idea about. Another multiple times daily function I used my phone for, broken by 'Google AI' because 'I should be happy with whatever they give me, it's a free product'.
Google's Youtube/Music algorithm punishes me if I flag AI slop in my feeds by removing those genres/topics, trying to force AI slop into my feed. This one I actually (well until it runs out the end of the month because I canceled) pay for.
Google has trained their users not to use Pixel's voice/AI capabilities, and to resent them (in the typical Google way, be damned with the old it's been replaced with our new half baked product that will itself be replaced shortly after the bugs are gone and it starts to work kind of OK (still really bad, but Google justifies bad is OK because it's 'FREE').
No one is integrating anything new from Google into their routine. No one is integrating Google's broken AI stuff into their daily routine, because it's friggen BROKEN. Google just one day removed me from setting voice timers with my phone, a core use case, for a year, because they could. My routine is not going back to using Google for things I count on just working because Google will arbitrarily break it and I will get the impact (maybe a burnt dinner, maybe faulty news reporting that causes me a heart attack, maybe who knows, maybe a missed important appointment tomorrow?).
Google doesn't care that I'm hit because 'it's good enough for a free product' to them. Everyone I know with a Pixel hates the ecosystem right now. Removing sideloading might fix that and improve good will I guess though? God Google doesn't know and hates their users/advocates/supporters. Google has moved themselves from 'a good solution' to 'good enough for a cheap device and free tools', and made damn sure I know it (via burnt dinners, having to move to my podcast app for (less current) news, by degrading my music/youtube feeds).
Google is a zombie company, they are dead, they just don't know it yet. Coming soon... Alphabet, a Bending Spoons company.
> Google is a zombie company, they are dead, they just don't know it yet. Coming soon... Alphabet, a Bending Spoons company
Google isn’t the next IBM. It’s the next Microsoft - boring, extremely profitable because of inertia. But crappy end user products.
apple is quite smart with this, there was a time when people thought they were dumb for not buying up tesla and ultimately shutting down their self driving division, but now it seems like a good bet.
> why would Amazon let that happen?
Google too. Google owns 14%.
There is literally 0 value in buying Anthropic when they can just sign a sweet deal to license Gemini (or some other model).
I've been a GCP consultant for close to a decade now. Google messed up big time lagging behind in AI - they just kept increasing prices in other products for about 5 years straight (CDN, for example) and did nothing to productize AI. I'm of the belief that ChatGPT should've been their pilot project. What they have now (AI mode) in Google should've been there well before ChatGPT.
But, all that aside, you know what they're really good at? Google Cloud. I'm a user of all the major Cloud providers and nothing beats GCP's interface. Azure? Complicated, buggy and unreliable. There's some exploit every quarter. AWS? Overly complex security policies even to deploy a basic app, very enterprise focused and startup-unfriendly. GCP - you can be up and running on a serverless/VM instance in your lunch break. Simple, reliable, scales effortlessly. We serve 10M+ visitors on there and we've had zero issues in the last half a decade with them.
They suck at a lot of other things and they have a lot of other problems. But boy, are they good at Cloud. No wonder even Apple is their customer. It's one of the few products from Google where you can say "it just works".
I think App Engine was really ahead of its time in showing how simple cloud deployments can be. It had a similar ease of use as setting up a YouTube account. For that reason, a lot of people thought of it as a toy, which was kind of unfair because companies like Niantic were able to build global products on it. So a lot of Google Cloud afterward ended up being designed to be more "normal" like how Amazon is. Now people are seeing what normal gets them, so maybe it's going to be time for the Google way of doing things to finally shine. (Disclaimer: I'm a Google employee)
App Engine caused a huge innovator's dilemma for Google when it came to cloud. It only addressed a set of use cases around web application development- Folks would ask "why shoudl we build a low-margin cloud?" and I'd tell people: "if I can't import numpy, App Engine is useless to me". Eventually, the useful bits of AE were extracted to other services with APIs (datastore is one example), but it wasn't until google built a full GCP that they started to see real cloud growth (revenue).
"Normal" is what most of us want.
App Engine was the OG serverless before "serverless" was even a term:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=s...
C and Perl CGI, and later PHP, would like a word ...
(CGI is a webserver starting a binary in response to a web request, essentially piping the request into stdin and sending stdout back to the client, in some ways it's brilliantly simple and very unix-y)
Oh in terms of coding, definitely other simple options existed. But you still had to go through the work of provisioning a server, deploying your code to it, and then getting a public IP address and a domain name before you could access it. I meant in terms of going from "0 to Cloud", GAE was ahead of its time.
Most ISPs let you host CGI and later PHP files on your account, to encourage people to make websites. A guestbook, for example. For a while this was really popular.
Oooh, that's interesting, I was not aware of that!
I totally second this. AppEngine was way ahead of its time. I used it for all my projects back then. The only reason I stopped using it for clients because even internal Google employees had no idea when the plug might be pulled out on AppEngine. AppEngine supported Elixir far earlier than anyone else (Elixir is my main go-to stack)
Ah, that's a shame they went that way. What I tell people when they're first getting into GCP is that it's gonna be a passion to set up what you want. But, the offerings are great, and once it's working, it'll just work
I am also a cloud consultant focused on AWS and a former employee of AWS ProServe (I have no love lost for the company).
But if you are a consultant, why pray tell are you spending that much time in the console except for occasional monitoring? Everything is either CLI commands or infrastructure as code.
And the issue with Google in particular is their customer support and business enterprise go to market sucks. The sales guys at ProServe use to run circles around GCP and never really took them seriously or had talking points. For big contracts we mostly had to compete with Azure because big boring enterprise was already using Microsoft.
When we did have to compete against GCP - and their sales team didn’t blow up the deal themselves - we just had to say “do you really want to trust Google with your workloads? Look at their history of abandoning products and raising prices”
Apple is a customer of all of the big cloud providers and was on stage at last year’s reinvent.
AWS throws money and people at startups. I’ve been on three sides - working at a 60 person startup who hosted on AWS, working at ProServe and now a third party consulting company where many deals come about because of AWS funding.
Google has the resources to win AI, but I still don't see a way to resolve the tension between good AI and ad revenue. A useful AI tells me what I need to know, but Google's cash cow is selling users to advertisers. Those are fundamentally oppositional and I don't see a clear way to resolve it.
Google can kick ass in AI all day, but soon Gemini is going to be saying shit like, "it sounds like your air conditioner is broken, maybe you should call Clearwater HVAC - they're the best!"
Once Google has to start making money from AI, talking to Gemini is going to feel like talking to that friend that invited you to dinner only to try to pitch you on an MLM.
>maybe you should call Clearwater HVAC
Wouldn't one possible solution be just adding a sidebar with ads for products/services relevant to the current topic? They don't need to change the model output to have ads. (Not advocating for ads, just pointing out there's lots of ways to deliver ads)
How is that going to work when
1) any time a model is improved, the improvements are not spectacular (anymore), and it takes less than 9 months for the performance to be reproduced by a <1% sized model. Those 9 months are down from 2 years btw.
2) the big target for ads is becoming phones, and specifically tiktok advertisements, to the point that lots of people don't even use computers anymore for online purchases?
> Google can kick ass in AI all day, but soon Gemini is going to be saying shit like, "it sounds like your air conditioner is broken, maybe you should call Clearwater HVAC - they're the best!"
That is the nightmare scenario. The puzzle for me is why you apparently think it just a trap for Google. All of the pure AI companies are burning cash. That is going to stop. Either they go broke, or they do something with ads.
There is a third option I guess, and that is they create something that is useful enough to be worth paying for. It won't be just an LLM, but as far as I can tell they are all just fine tuning LLM's. We already know what the limits of an LLM are, as we are already there.
All except Google that is, who are building AI's for all sorts of things, such as protein folding, weather prediction and driving cars. LLM's were their invention, created by them for doing translation and OCR. And unlike everyone else, they aren't dependent on NVidia as they use their own internally developed hardware. Surely there is no argument about Google being the world's power house of AI?? Most of these efforts will be experiments Google is infamous for abandoning. But it's seems likely one or two will become the youtubes of AI.
I can't see anything remotely comparable from the other AI companies. It's difficult to see how this doesn't end with Google completely dominating the space, and all these LLM companies going broke.
Do you define "AI" as LLMs?
I ask, because earlier this year I had the chance to use a Waymo for the first time. I moved a good chunk of my portfolio to GOOG after that.
To me, Waymo felt like either Magic or stepping 15+ years into the future; Demolition Man stuff (im a child of the 80s, Xenial).
Stuff like Waymo, AlphaFold and similar are just so far away from anybody else, that Alphabet could split in several companies and all of them would be hugely dominant in the future. And none of them base their revenue in advertising.
Google is literally, today, making money from AI. Not only that but the presence of competing AI services has resulted only in record revenue and straight quarters of ad revenue growth since ChatGPT was launched.
I presume they will do what they have done successfully for the last decade or two and separate the recommendations from the ads. So you'll have gemini saying unbiasedly what it thinks and then a separate "sponsored" bit say "Buy Clearwater!"
There is no way for anyone to resolve it, you'll either be paying premium, running last gen stuff locally, or getting ads, regardless of whether you use Google, OpenAI or anyone else.
They have an entire cloud division and they just announced it grew by 33%
and you think the competitors won't put ads in?
Wtf does “put ads in” mean? Google ads is one of the most sophisticated and profitable machines on the planet. People seem to think it’s as simple as <your ad here>.
The competitors will either figure it out or run out of money and collapse (or, both)
"They already operate the world's largest and (profitable) information index, they design their own chips, and employ the best engineers who know how to deliver massive systems cost-effectively."
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204425...
"Nature of Operations
Google was incorporated in California in September 1998 and re-incorporated in the State of Delaware in August 2003. In 2015, we implemented a holding company reorganization, and as a result, Alphabet Inc. ("Alphabet") became the successor issuer to Google.
We generate revenues by delivering relevant, cost-effective online advertising; cloud-based solutions that provide enterprise customers of all sizes with infrastructure, platform services, and applications; sales of other products and services, such as fees received for subscription-based products, apps and in-app purchases, and devices."
Would "(profitable) information index" be included in (a) "online advertising" (b) "cloud-based solutions" or (c) "sales of other products and services"
HN comment claims Alphabet operates (profitable) information index
But Alphabet SEC filing discloses its revenue-generating operations are (a) online advertising delivery, (b) cloud-based solutions and (c) sales of other products and services
US law requires the statements in Alphabet's disclosure to be accurate, not misleading
Nothing requires statements in HN comments to be accurate, not misleading
What is "(profitable) information index"
Is it part of (a) online advertising delivery, b) cloud-based solutions or (c) sales of other products and services
It's hard to understand what point you're trying to make with your weird quoting. Can you elaborate in a straightforward way?
I think it'll be Google and effectively Microsoft -- OpenAI is already so partnered with Microsoft, and if OpenAI messes up financially, Microsoft will end up bailing it out in exchange for majority ownership. So yes the music may stop playing but that doesn't mean OpenAI disappears, but maybe Sam does.
Unless there are antitrust concerns, but that's hard to see because Google is competition and Anthropic will probably remain the third more niche player.
Google's new AI voice assistant finally seems to reliably set timers. The problem is they released it what, a year ago? And during that time it didn't and I now no longer trust the AI on my phone to do tasks. Google themselves trained me not to trust their AI tools.
Youtube (Google) currently degrades my feed because when I block AI videos, they assume I dislike the related topic. They have made it either I love AI videos/music, or they punish me.
You are right, they have stakeholders causing inertia to protect their fiefdoms across a large range of products. You are right, they have (profitable) current products which will prove to be barriers to nimble, future, nearterm non-profitable products. I'm not sure that's a strength seeing how they have responded so far.
They are too big and too slow to adapt. They have too many people with interests in protecting their (legacy) niche, too much inertia to overcome. The classic signs of a zombie company. Going purely off their ability to adapt in the last year, they are dead and don't even know it yet.
Google is on pace to have >1B Gemini MAUs by Q2 2026.
This definitely doesn't look like it's going to be a winner takes all market.
OpenAI doesn't release MAUs, but it's possible Gemini could surpass OpenAI in MAUs (but really unlikely DAUs) by the end of 2026.
Google also own the ad space in a way that's unsurpassed, and that's the most direct route from where they are with their AI product and profitability.
Tangentially, it's sad to see AI become yet another attention factory. Sora 2 is OAI trying to get the jump on this, but I think it's quite likely that they'll get clobbered by Google and Meta when those companies start juicing their users attention in the same way - they have the ad buyers and the infrastructure for that business already, it's literally how they've made money this whole time.
> This is one of the reasons I believe Google will ultimately win the AI race once the VC funding tap runs dry.
They've already successfully monetised their chatbot (Gemini)[1] while all the others are still wondering how to get there.
-------------------
[1] I've got about 15 - 20 additions to the settings to prefix all chats with "don't show me video links", but apparently the "show youtube link" is at the system layer and cannot be overridden at all.
Wouldn't this same logic apply to IBM back in its heyday?
The biggest risk for Google is that it is already a behemoth and it has lost a lot of what made it so special. I also think they have a huge conflict of interest when it comes to AI, because it is a threat to their core business.
To be fair, Alphabet id REQUIRED to be strong in AI. Google as a search engine is losing clicks to its own AI summaries. If they didn't have that, they would risk the ad business in the future
Money alone cannot win the race; it will require a strong vision, courage, and luck. OpenAI and XAI and Anthropic (though underfunded) seem to lead in those factors so far.
If ability to sustain investment was the key apple wouldn’t be fumbling the ball so hard, wouldn’t they?
I can’t understand how they’re bleeding talent.
Re AI their continued investment in TPUs might one day prove existentially competitive to Nvidia’a GPUs?
Isn't Microsoft maybe waiting for that and grab OpenAI at a huge discount?
I have been saying the exact same thing for a while
idk google is so flaky, one must not forget that they had the llm concept first and couldnt really materialize it into anything commercial until chat gpt came around. Google often could dominate a market, yet they kill the product/tech instead of keeping a small team to maintain it.
I think the winner will be between xai or meta, im leaning more with xai since elon seems to always have 100% conviction even with seemingly bad ideas and he is way more technical than sam & zuck
> they had the llm concept first and couldnt really materialize it into anything commercial until chat gpt came around.
Wasn't the "fuzzy search" that ignored keywords run by some sort of LLM? I.e. "lady gaga age" would return documents with "lady gaga old" etc.
> Wasn't the "fuzzy search" that ignored keywords run by some sort of LLM? I.e. "lady gaga age" would return documents with "lady gaga old" etc.
That was embeddings AFAIK, so yeah, similar technology to LLMs.
You honestly think talent is going to xAI? Why do neither of these companies have a SoTA model?
>I believe Google will ultimately win the AI race once the VC funding tap runs dry.
Your mention of "VC funding" may be a placeholder for conversational purposes but just to clarify, OpenAI is way beyond the small pocketbooks of typical Venture Capitalists. They have investments from huge sovereign wealth funds (e.g. billions from Middle East oil funds) and trillion-dollar corporations like NVIDIA, Microsoft, AMD, etc.
In other words, OpenAI has embedded itself into the money and tech ecosystem much more deeply than the dotcom failed startup Webvan burning through the limited cash of Sequoia VC.
There are lots of heavily funded vested interests that don't want to see Google be the ultimate winner (or only winner).
So did wework. Didn't stop it from going under. Some financial truths are like shouting at gravity.
Wework's CEO was not hobnobbing with the leaders of sovereign nations.
And after people get used to using AI from Google, they discontinue it, just like they’ve done with so many other services.
Sarcasm, of course, for those who didn’t catch it - it’s hard to make jokes online.
Google has so much cash from other services…
"When it comes to software engineering at scale, nothing beats Google"
I agree with many of your statements, but this one simply isn't true. They've really struggled to integrate AI into products in a useful way. Do you remember glue on pizza? Founding Fathers reimagined for DEI? The Brain/DeepMind merger was largely an acknowledgement of their many misses from a product perspective.
The pizza glue and DEI stuff were temporary glitches on new products. Their basic engineering on search, gmail etc is pretty solid.
It's not really impressive to me in absolute terms that GCP grew by 34% because it's still in last place behind Azure. I worked with all three major CSPs at a past company and Google, by far, had the worst support, the worst network, the most issues, and at the same time they were the least willing to build custom features for us while Azure and AWS would constantly fight for our business.
IMHO I think Microsoft is a lot closer in terms of creating a real business around AI because they understand Enterprise customers. In fact they were first to offer private OpenAI deployments with AuthN/AuthZ that you could drop in your own VPC and the ability to handle sensitive data while everyone else was handing out API keys off a public endpoint like a startup. Don't get me wrong Google has had some okay technology (i.e. Gemini 2.5 is middle of the pack) but they seem like a very consumer-oriented company and don't seem to know how to market them.
Maybe I was not at your scale but I’ve had the exact opposite experience with GCP. I would prefer to use it but now I work at an all AWS shop.
I have used the major hyperscalers for years. I agree with you that Google is the worst business partner, but saying they have the worst network and more issues does not align with my experience at all. Azure is miles behind on technical prowess.
I build tools for our security teams, I guarantee you the only reason we use Microsoft Azure is corporate deals. All the critical infrastructure is on AWS (including our Azure monitoring tools), and if we could move from Azure to GCP all our security experts would be happy (except maybe the red team members whose job would be harder)
You’re being way too dismissive of the importance of sales, customer support, inertia and reputation are when it comes to technology choices.
Google loses on all of those fronts.