Is Google even relevant these days?
In my opinion they have been a zombie company with zero innovation for well over a decade now...
Discussion
Yep. Without them Android wouldn't even be a thing.
The open source community would have carried Android just fine, and we don't even need it, there are already decent Linux phones.
I agree that they did not really come up with anything new. They too mostly jumped on the LLM bandwagon. Every big software company is doing it as if it's a winner-takes-all competition.
Also google already seem to have found their sweet spot selling you ads. Worked great 15 years ago, still works great today. It feels like they are mostly focused on vendor lock-in and probably try to automate away as much of their workforce as possible to squeeze out higher profits.
That is exactly what they are doing.
And bankrolling and enabling socialist regimes... 🤷♂️