Google had to do this. They cannot die standing watching ChatGPT et. al. eating their ad-free lunch.

The problem with that is Google has burned so many bridges with users over the past couple of decades that moving off the ad model to some sort of paid subscription service is going to be next to impossible. People just don't trust Google any more. I know many people who happily pay OpenAI every month but wouldn't pay the same for Google Gemini even if it was better.

Not to mention that actually giving Google money for anything other than an in-app purchase is oddly hard work - try buying a Google business subscription and behold an interface worse than AWS's console. Google has so much catching up to do that it's conceivable that they'll eventually fail.