So, the supposition here is that Google's AI capabilities are superior. Let's see:

• OCR: worse than Amazon Textract
• voice (TTS): worse than Natural Reader
• translation: worse than DeepL
• YT recommendations: very mediocre and inflexible
• assistant: still as dumb as it was 10 years ago
• search: a crapshoot of spam and ads, with occasional nuggets of useful data
• language models: no demo, just samples, easy to fake or make seem more impressive than they really are
• image generation: same, no demo and no API, just cherry picked samples (they can keep their image generators, nobody needs them anymore)
• AI inference: GCP is inferior to Azure and AWS, and Azure has GPT-3
• speech recognition: here they do have excellent AI, but the open sourced Whisper is just as good or better (from OpenAI - one of the few models they did release)
• computational photography: yes, they are great at it
• ML frameworks: TensorFlow lost the war with PyTorch

By the way, the people who invented the transformer, they all left Google and have startups, except one. So they lost key innovators who didn't think Google was supporting them enough.

The problem with Google was not lack of capability - it was the fact that they were making too much money already on the current system. But what works today won't necessarily work tomorrow. They are like Microsoft 20 years ago, who lost web search, mobile and web browser markets because they were too successful at the moment.