It’s Google’s World, We’re All Just Living In It
Default is destiny - Gemini now lives in your inbox, your pocket, and (Siri-ously) maybe your iPhone.
Here is the part no one wants to say out loud: Google finally connected every dot. Not just a shiny model or a splashy demo, the whole stack. Gemini in your browser, Gemini in your inbox, Gemini inside your phone, and now a very real chance that Gemini shows up on your iPhone when you ask for help. That is not a product cycle, that is distribution meeting competence.
Let me start where executives feel it first, the daily grind. Workspace has billions of users and millions of businesses paying for it, which means Docs, Sheets, Gmail, and Meet are the runway where new habits form. The day I showed a COO how Gemini cleaned a 3,412-row export in Sheets, then drafted the customer email in the same window, we did not talk about AI, we talked about cycle time. That is the tell.
On the consumer side, Android is still the biggest addressable surface in tech by a wide margin. If you sell anything to people with phones, the gravity is obvious. More devices, more queries, more chances for Google’s assistants to step in and do work, not just fetch links. Pair that with Gmail’s scale, and you get an engine that learns where people live their work.
Now to the models and the toys, because the toys matter when they become tools. Veo 3 brought video into everyday workflows, not as a filmmaker’s dream but as a real step: animate stills, build short clips, put them straight into a sales deck or a training module. The image editor with the silly codename, Nano Banana, rocketed to the top of the community rankings and stayed there with a big margin, which sounds like trivia until you are a brand manager who needs the same person, the same product, the same color balance across a dozen edits. Consistency is not glamorous, it is how campaigns get approved.
Search grew up. AI Mode moved from novelty to muscle. Ask a layered question, get a concise plan, keep the thread going, and hand off tasks like dinner reservations or (coming soon) event tickets. It is not perfect, it is useful, and useful at the front door of the internet changes behavior. When your first touch does the task, the long tail of alternatives starts to feel like work.
Hardware is not a side story here. Pixel 10 put all of this in your pocket with Tensor G5, that 100x Pro Res Zoom trick that rescues ridiculous crops, and small quality-of-life wins like Qi2 magnets that make cases and chargers snap into place. Google is also bundling a year of its AI subscription on the higher-end models in many regions, which is not charity, it is a smart nudge to get people living inside the tools. Once the assistant writes your doc comments and fixes your photo set before you even ask, you stop shopping around.
Now the two updates that change the slope, not just the story.
First, the antitrust ruling. A federal judge called Google an illegal monopoly last year, then this week declined to break up the company or ban its default-search payments. The court ordered data-sharing and some guardrails, but left the core distribution deals intact, including the money Google sends to Apple for default placement. Wall Street read that as a green light. If you run a P&L, read it as time. Time to keep rolling out AI features into the surfaces Google already owns. Time to let AI Mode mature globally. Time to ship Veo and Nano Banana improvements without a cloud of forced divestitures. The worst-case scenario did not land. That matters.
Second, Apple. Reports say Apple and Google reached a formal agreement for Apple to evaluate a Google model for Siri, with Gemini as the front-runner. Apple has been clear that it wants outside models for world knowledge, and the reporting ties that to a broader AI search project under development. If that sticks, even in a scoped way, you get the world’s two most valuable distribution channels, iPhone and Google services, working together on the parts customers actually feel. The peaks of this are not abstract: a Siri handoff to Gemini for complex answers, on Apple’s privacy-controlled servers, while Apple’s own models handle on-device tasks. Everyone gets what they are best at, the end user gets a better assistant, and none of this fights the antitrust ruling that just blessed the status quo on defaults.
Put the pieces together. Distribution: Android, Search front door, Workspace at work, potential Siri handoff on iPhone. Product: Gemini 2.5 family in the apps you already use, Veo 3 for video, Nano Banana for images. Hardware: Pixel 10 with on-device smarts and subscription trials that pull people into the ecosystem. Policy: a ruling that avoided a break-up and let default deals continue while nudging data-sharing. That is a four-engine aircraft. You can pick at any single claim, but the thrust comes from the combination.
Here is the headline I am watching: Gemini 3. There is no date yet, and that is fine. When it drops, my bet is that it takes the top slot on public leaderboards, surpassing OpenAI and Anthropic in reasoning, writing, analytics, tool calling, and coding. Why I think that: the 2.5 cadence, longer context that actually holds, cleaner tool use, and native Workspace hooks. If you own a budget or a roadmap, plan for a quality jump and a quick push through Search, Workspace, Android, and Pixel. Have your playbook ready, then tune it to the hour the release notes hit.
I am not saying Google is perfect. I am saying Google is present. The company that quietly ships the features people actually touch, across tools they already use, tends to win. It looks boring right up until the moment your competitors stop talking about experiments and start talking about throughput. If the Apple piece lands, even as an “evaluate and test” phase that becomes a real integration later, the story tilts further. And after this week’s ruling, Google has the room to keep pushing.
Everyone else can keep arguing about who has the smartest model. Google is turning the internet into a working assistant and putting it everywhere. That is the ballgame.
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