Google had a humble beginning as a simple search engine back in 1998. But if you look at it today, it has turned into a giant corporation that runs some of the biggest internet services, including Gmail, YouTube, Maps, and whatnot — it even has a self-driving car project of its own! While software has always remained Google’s forte, given it runs the biggest mobile operating system by user count, it got into the hardware business (it owned Motorola for a while), with its lineup of phones, tablets, and some great smart home devices.

That is quite a shift for an internet company that started in a garage barely a couple of decades ago. Despite all those achievements, one could argue that Google is still a search engine first, while others may say it’s an ad company at its core, neither of which can be refuted. As Google reaches a crucial life juncture at the age of 25, like all adults, it must answer one pivotal question: whether it has a firm direction to pursue in the years to come or it is happy being a mishmash of everything?

If one is willing to jump to anything thrown at them and do everything all at once, it indicates a lack of focus and clarity on what exactly they want, which also appears to be a long-standing problem with Google. And that’s pretty much the kind of quarter-life crisis Google has been going through for a while.

Google has a solid base of core products — its foundational services that are too big to go anywhere. Gmail and Maps are two of the biggest examples. They have been around for a long time and continue to get the company’s attention with constant development and maintenance to keep them in tip-top shape all through the year. Google has an additional incentive to work on Gmail in particular as it’s a central part of all its services, including its business-facing Workspace app suite. Then there are some “peripheral” services that aren’t as lucky.

When Google Assistant first came out way back in 2016, it was the highlight of just about everything the company was doing. Google wanted the voice bot to be always ready to use on your phone, smartwatch, living room TV, and even your car — basically wherever there was a potential use case, the Assistant was made available.

Google was enthusiastic about this powerful voice assistant, and its development happened at a rapid pace, with new features added every now and then. It became the control center for all your smart home devices and started understanding dozens of international languages, making smartphones even more accessible for billions of people worldwide. But then something happened.

Over the last couple of Google I/O events, AI has become and remained the buzzword, and Google has often projected itself as the pioneer of AI development, as far as predictive AI is concerned. But OpenAI’s ChatGPT left Google in the dust when it took the world by storm with its generative AI tool that could chat with you with relative ease. It was one of the most notable and path-breaking developments in the tech world in recent years. More recently, the GPT4 model has become something that Google has no ready-to-deploy equivalent for.

And just like a little puppy with an irresistible impulse, Google found a new fad in the form of generative AI. It quickly became its focus, which is evident from the software direction the company has taken with the arrival of Bard for text conversations and Duet AI as an AI-powered helping hand in Workspace apps. Google has also sped up its internal development of a more capable multimodal AI model called Gemini, which could be on par with OpenAI’s GPT4.

But as Google paid more attention to its new toy, everything else has taken a back seat, including the Google Assistant. Its development has been stagnant for a while, with no meaningful feature added in a long time. On the contrary, Google has been breaking stuff off late, pushing people to look for alternatives. While Assistant Snapshot looked like a usable replacement for Google Now (one of our favorite Google features that got killed), Google removed that as well. Support for third-party notes apps through Assistant is now also gone for good. On top of this, we have noticed on multiple occasions that the Assistant has gotten noticeably slow and is often unable to understand the commands.

While the Assistant is in desperate need of a generative AI reboot, the competition appears to be ahead of the curve. Alexa continues to get a fair bit of attention from Amazon despite recent reports of mass layoffs from the Alexa team. Amazon recently announced that it’s integrating its large language model (LLM) into Alexa to make it more conversational and give it a more opinionated personality. Siri, too, just got an offline mode on the Apple Watch, something Wear OS watches can’t do with Assistant, and it now even supports bilingual mode for some Indic languages, which in certain cases is better than Assistant’s.

Google abandoning its products goes beyond software. The Nest Hub Max hasn’t seen a follow-up since 2019, while Amazon consistently updates its Alexa hardware every year or two, which has kept it ahead of the curve. Even if you leave new product launches out of the equation, Google has simultaneously been deprecating its existing Nest smart speakers. While it ended support for third-party smart displays some time ago, leaving many users in the lurch, its own Nest speakers have become less reliable for many people, at least anecdotally. Google even abandoned its plans of updating all its smart displays and speakers to Fuchsia OS, and now, you can’t even add your Nest speakers to more than one user group, which is just frustrating for users.

These are just two recent examples of how Google’s product strategy is going. You can’t forget how Google Stadia came to an end on the heels of a spirited launch. People have been joking that Stadia would be killed soon right from its launch, and it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It also still stings that everyone’s favorite email app Inbox got killed.

In fact, there are an endless number of things Google killed. And that doesn’t include the dozen messaging apps that Google has created and put an end to over the years. Without much long-term clarity, none of Google’s attempts could even match iMessage or WhatsApp. Its current focus is on RCS in Messages, as it continues to desperately nudge Apple to get on board, which is honestly getting embarrassing. Nobody ignores the competition as Apple does, and it’s about time Google learned that and moved on.

With this ostensively fickle attitude, Google doesn’t come off as a dependable brand — one that people can invest in for the long run. While it can replicate the Apple ecosystem all it wants, it will still need to address its itch to pick up on new trends and ditch existing products until they end up in the graveyard. Google can choose to be a strong product company or a software company (or both!), but it must double down on its efforts to prove its stability and make sure its customers don’t feel left out — or worse, lose confidence in the company’s products and their long-term viability.

Turning 25 for anyone is a time for introspection and soul-searching to figure out a path forward. Google, you’re 25 now, and it’s time to get serious about some things. I am saying this to you just as a concerned parent would.