I was thinking the other day that it's particularly weird that Gmail is so bereft of features after all this time. It's not that they've left it completely as-is "this is great, there is nothing to do"—but just that the things they have tried have been... kinda uninteresting and quite simple? It's weird to me that with the other AI features they've tried (including suggested responses and such in drafting new emails) there isn't anything, say, to make really good proactive suggestions for like "apply this label to all incoming emails like this."

That sort of stagnation, though, and lack of their "trying things" really moving the needle compared to their decades-old ads product, makes me think they really are becoming the new IBM. IBM, in my estimation, has largely been irrelevant to the future of computing since the early 80s when MS ended up owning the PC story, but they have still had some quite solid stock prices runs at times over the decades (10x in five years at the end of the 90s, say). You can make a lot of money with a no-longer-that-interesting business.

I honest to God cannot see how someone informed at all could call Google stagnant. Name almost anything and Google is on the frontier. Quantum computing, self driving, language models, network infrastructure, TPUs, etc.

It's some sort of delusion on this website that Google is falling behind. Or more likely, wishful thinking.