This is an unusual opinion in industry, although common with consumers.
Currently, Google has the most cost effective model (Flash 2) for tons of corporate work (OCR, classifiers, etc).
They just announced likely the most capable model currently in the market with Gemini 2.5.
Their small open source models (Gemma 3) are very good.
It is true that they've struggled to execute on product, but the actual technology is very good and getting substantial adoption in industry. Personally I've moved quite a few workloads to Google from OpenAI and Anthropic.
My main complaint is that they often release impressive models, but gimp them in experimental mode for too long, without fully releasing them (2.5 is currently in this category).
Currently, Google has the most cost effective model (Flash 2) for tons of corporate work (OCR, classifiers, etc).
They just announced likely the most capable model currently in the market with Gemini 2.5.
Their small open source models (Gemma 3) are very good.
It is true that they've struggled to execute on product, but the actual technology is very good and getting substantial adoption in industry. Personally I've moved quite a few workloads to Google from OpenAI and Anthropic.
My main complaint is that they often release impressive models, but gimp them in experimental mode for too long, without fully releasing them (2.5 is currently in this category).