Comment by alex-mohr

And you could write a similar blog post about why Google "failed" at AI productization (at least as of a year ago). For some of the same and some completely different reasons.

  - two competing orgs via Brain and DeepMind.

  - members of those orgs were promoted based on ...?  Whatever it was, something not developing consumer or enterprise products, and definitely not for cloud.

  - Nvidia is a Very Big Market Cap company based on selling AI accelerators.  Google sells USB Coral sticks.  And rents accelerators via Cloud.  But somehow those are not valued at Very Big Market Cap.

Of course, they're fixing some of those problems: brain and DeepMind merged and Gemini 2.5 pro is a very credible frontier model. But it's also a cautionary tale about unfettered research focus insufficiently grounded in customer focus.