What does "leading from the front" get them?

There is absolutely no loyalty when it comes to coding. Nothing could be more common than people threating to jump ship whenever another frontier or open source model comes.

Google is clearly able to keep growing their free and consumer and small business use cases. Unlike corporate coding, we actually have evidence that solo and small businesses can actually see productivity gains.

Anthropic and OpenAI need to stay dancing like mad, because it's their source revenue which underpins their investments.

Why does Google need to shove something at the top at the same desperate cadence? Other than "recursive self improvement leads to AGI" it seems perfectly fine if they push out something dramatically better every year and half.

They simply don't have the leadership to lead. And it starts from the top.

Google promotes people based on shipping features, not making good software. So this breakage means someone is shipping features.

You should be happy for them.