I totally agree. Characterising Google as "flailing" because Gemini isn't the #1 model for coding at the moment is... not realistic, to put it politely. In addition to the factors you mention, Google has enormous cash flow from its ad business, which translates to a long runway when compared to other frontier AI outfits.

It's possible that they will nevertheless snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, of course, but I personally think they're in the strongest position of them all.

They are doing fine as a shovel salesman (GPUs/TPUs, being the inference hardware provider, though I now wonder if their token processing stats are their own or combined with those who are running on their hardware too, I've been conditioned to be far more skeptical of Big Ai these days)

On the flip side, gemini is terrible at coding by comparison, so much so google has now given all engineers access to claude. They promised us Gemini 3.5 pro at their developer event this summer, now it seems it will never be released. Antigravity usage is on par with grok (~1%). They've removed the feedback button for "ai answers" at the top of search, that does not seem well received, it hallucinates too much (and may be a legal liability, some courts have ruled as such in the EU). Talk to googlers IRL, things are not so happy internally. You can see the forced gemini usage for coding and subsequent slop in their products, especially gcloud console. I was sent the greatest slop deck by one of their sales people for Gemini Enterprise, needless to say we did not buy from them, but we did get an amazing :cursed-claude: emoji from the deck (nano banana's take on what claude looks like as a person)

a rambled sample, hope this helps, I was a google superfan for a long time, I was sad to see things go south, now I'm happy that I was motivated to move off most their platforms (gmail/youtube remain)