> Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away
Competent is a stretch. Google's AI offering seems to be, once again, PM led–lots of constantly-changing brands being merged and deprecated with zero customer support or service.
They'll almost certainly be one of the survivors. Their technical competece is unmatched. But that doesn't mean they have a great product in the way both OpenAI and Anthropic do. (Outside their datacentres, which are a legitimate feat.)
Google has never been good at supporting developers, and it absolutely loathes end users. Support for everything that is not their ad ecosystem is miserable. There's never any long term plan, everything gets deprecated and bitrots.
After all this time it's still a pain point just to pay them for a Gemini API key.