Institutional misincentives at Google. People are promoted for launching a product, and they're promoted away from the product they launched, and nobody wants to maintain it since you don't get promoted for maintaining a product someone else launched.

There are a lot of possible futures for Google. Here are a couple that I see:

1. Google de-ossifies and starts shipping. They have all the AI talent and infra necessary to "own" AI and get people and industry using its models and products. They don't have the same costs that OpenAI and Anthropic do and have a much healthier income stream. They can productively put Gemini in front of more people and embed deep into people's lives. Google leapfrogs Apple, Amazon, Meta, and its other peers because of its incumbent advantages in AI, data, and distribution.

2. Google bleeds out all Google Search ad revenue. People switch away from Chrome to browser agents that have adblock and remove ads. Gemini languishes. Once unassailable Android comes under attack from vibe coded upstarts that no longer require a trillion dollars to compete. Google still sells a lot of enterprise B2B infra (cloud, workspace) and YouTube continues to thrive. Everything else about Google becomes IBM while YouTube becomes Comcast. Still a giant, but a shell of its former self.

I'm sure there are other possible futures as well, but these are the two I see for Google.

I keep oscillating between predictions #1 and #2. Right now I'm feeling #2.