for what it's worth, it's fairly popular among my non-technical coworkers here in Russia. we have unlimited access to all models so it's not about the cost, and they still prefer Gemini over Claude and GPT. I never bothered to ask why, but I assume it's better at communicating in Russian.

This from the country whose entire IT population is still to this day entirely enamored with windows.

Not sure it's a valid data point.