Comment by fourside

Huh? They absolutely were blindsided and the evidence is there. No one expected ChatGPT to take off like it did, not even OpenAI. Google put out some embarrassing products out for the first couple of years, called a code red internally, asked Sergey and Larry to come back. The fact that they recovered doesn’t mean they weren’t initially blindsided.

People are surprised because Google released multiple surprisingly bad products and it was starting to look like they had lost their edge. It’s rare for a company their size to make such a big turnaround so quickly.