The Ledger
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Gerstner: Google search market share and gross margins will decline
“Your share likely goes down over time because you have people like ChatGPT you have to compete with. But worse yet, your margin on each of those queries goes down over time. I don't know what it nets out at, 50%, 60%. Now, mind you, for perplexity or co-pilot …”
Gerstner: $20 Monthly Fees for Consumer AI Are Not Defensible
“Listen, I don't think a 20 dollar a month fee for my consumer AI is going to be defensible. And the reason I don't think that's defensible is because they're going to be way too many people in the pool. Apple's going to have one. Google's going to have one. Me…”
Gerstner: AI answer engines will operate below margin to take search share
“It would be surprising to me if we don't see Meta AI, and Microsoft, and ByteDance, and Perplexity, and all the others who are providing answer engines, ChatGPT, coming at them below margin, ok?”
Gurley: Ecosystem partners distrust Google and prefer OpenAI and Perplexity
“I don't think Google has treated its partners well in the search ecosystem. And so there's a lot of angst there and a lot of mistrust. And so if, OpenAI or perplexity came along and said, would you integrate and pass tokens? They might say yes. I think they're…”
Gerstner: Google faces an innovator's dilemma moving from search ads to answers
“I just think it's this innovator's dilemma, right, that Google faces, which is that 99% of their profits or a 110% of their profits comes from an advertising model around 10 blue links that is just at its core seems somewhat at odds with what perplexity is doi…”
Gurley: Perplexity looks like an acquisition candidate for tech incumbents
“It kind of looks like an acquisition candidate to me. I don't know if anyone can agree on price, but for one of these other players that hasn't been as successful from a product standpoint.”
Gurley: No consumer AI answer engine has shown holistically superior answer quality
“I, as of right now, and I've played with all of them, on the consumer side, I don't think anyone has a, perplexity came out, it was a lot faster. That was pretty cool. But when I just look at the quality of the answers, I don't, I mean, on different searches, …”
Gerstner: Buying Perplexity Would Cannibalize Google Unlike Meta's M&A
“With Instagram and WhatsApp, it was not, they were not facing innovators dilemma. They, those deals did not cannibalize their core business in the way that perplexity would cannibalize, at least in part, the core business at Google.”
Gurley: Antitrust Scrutiny Puts Google in a 1990s Microsoft-Style Penalty Box
“Google's like not allowed to do that right now, which it's totally crazy. I mean which, it's actually one last thing is. It's similar to Microsoft in the 96, 97 timeframe where they were, you know, in the penalty box and couldn't do those similar things.”