It's incredible that Google is letting OpenAI eat their lunch by capturing users while Google focuses on ad revenue.

OpenAI offered ChatGPT for free to anyone—even if not their best model—without needing to be logged in. That's crucial for attracting and retaining casual users.

If you compare this to what Google was at the beginning, it was just a simple interface to search the web: no questions asked, no subscription, no login. That was one of the secrets that led people to adopt Google Search when it was new (the other being result quality). It was a refreshing, simple page where you typed something and got results without any friction.

Now, with Gemini, Google finally has an excellent LLM. But a casual user can't use it unless they: 1. have a Google account, and 2. are logged in.

One might ask, "What's the matter? Everyone has a Google account." But the login requirement isn't as harmless as it seems. For example, if you want to quickly show a friend Gemini on their PC, but they use Safari and aren't logged into Google—bummer, you can't show them. Or a colleague asks about Gemini, but you can't log in with a personal account on a work machine. Gemini is immediately excluded from the realm of possibility. In the good old days, anyone could use Google at work instantly.

Right now, the companies capturing users are OpenAI (with the accessible ChatGPT brand) and Microsoft (with Copilot integrated into Microsoft 365). My company, for instance, sent a memo stating we must use Copilot with our corporate accounts for data security.

Google has botched this. They don't seem to understand that they are losing this round. They still have a strong position with Search and Android, but it’s funny to watch them make this huge strategic mistake.

NOTE: Personally, I dislike ads unless they are privacy-friendly and discrete (like early Google). If OpenAI starts using invasive ads, I will stop using ChatGPT immediately, just as I stopped using Google Search in favor of Kagi.