The comparison is between a useful shipping product available to everyone for a full year vs a tech demo of an extremely limited release to privileged customers.

There are millions of people for whom OpenAI's products are broadly useful, and the specifics of where they fall short compared to Gemini are irrelevant here, because Google isn't offering anything comparable that can be tested.

At the time, I believe IBM was still "we'll throw people and billable hours at a problem."

They had their lunch eaten because their competitors realized they could undercut IBM on price if they changed the equation to "throw compute at a problem."

In other words, sell prebuilt products instead of lead-ins to consulting. And harness advertising to offer free products to drive scale to generate profit. (e.g. Google/search)