[coderenegade]

Google is in an incredibly strong position. They're a top tier AI vendor, and in a world where content creation is largely commoditized and outsourced to AI, advertising companies will determine what gets seen, and what gets buried in the noise. They control both generation and visibility of what gets generated. Facebook could be in the same position, but they aren't as strong in AI. OpenAI wants to be Google, but they don't have the advertising reach.

Yeah, they aren't perfect or always necessarily the best in a given area, but to compare them to IBM is probably missing the forest for the trees.

[JeremyNT]

> Yeah, they aren't perfect or always necessarily the best in a given area, but to compare them to IBM is probably missing the forest for the trees.

I think comparing them to IBM is reasonable, just maybe not... today's IBM.

IBM was an absolute hardware and software behemoth leading up to the PC / early Internet era, after which they pivoted from making groundbreaking real things to providing "enterprise support."

They also outlasted almost all of their contemporaries with that pivot, for better or worse.

[trollbridge]

And at one point, IBM was at the head of the pack with AI. Remember Deep Blue?

[coderenegade]

IBM got to where it is today by being complacent and not keeping up with innovation. Google is notably at the forefront of innovation, in a driving seat, and that innovation directly stands to benefit one of their core businesses in a way that the market is probably only just beginning to understand. It's an entirely different situation, imo.

[jasomill]

A technology company that's profitably doing over $50 billion in sales after more than 100 years with no obvious signs of impending doom sounds like an okay position to me, even if the tables have turned since 1984[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I

[coderenegade]

The context here is that at one point, IBM was an innovator and global leader in the technology space before it got outcompeted. It was the first company to cross a $100 billion market cap. If you think of the IBM of 50 years ago as being roughly analogous to Apple today, the difference is pretty clear. Google is much closer to Apple than it is to IBM, and I don't see that changing.

[htrp]

Remember Watson?

[jagged-chisel]

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.

Nobody ever got fired for choosing Google.

Seems apropos.

[breppp]

For choosing Google Cloud? When was it ever conventional to choose Google Cloud?

[bushbaba]

Not really I’d not call Google the safest/most popular choice for AI or Cloud.