I agree what you’ve listed makes sense as a product portfolio.
But AI Studio is getting vibe coding tools. AI Studio also has a API that competes with Vertex. They have IDE plugins for existing IDEs to expose Chat, Agents, etc. They also have Gemini CLI for when those don’t work. There is also Firebase Studio, a browser based IDE for vibe coding. Jules, a browser based code agent orchestration tool. Opal, a node-based tool to build AI… things? Stich, a tool to build UIs. Colab with AI for a different type of coding. Notebook LM for AI research (many features now available in Gemini App). AI Overviews and AI mode in search, which now feature a generic chat interface.
Thats just new stuff, and not including all the existing products (Gmail, Home) that have Gemini added.
This is the benefit of a big company vs startups. They can build out a product for every type of user and every user journey, at once.
In "real world" you don't use OpenAI or Anthropic API directly—you are forced to use AWS, GCP, or Azure. Each of these has its own service for running LLMs, which is conceptually the same as using OpenAI or Anthropic API directly, but with much worse DX. For AWS it's called Bedrock, for GCP—Vertex, and for Azure it's AI Foundry I believe. They also may offer complementary features like prompt management, evals, etc, but from what I've seen so far it's all crap.
Jules is the first and only one to add a full API, which I've found very beneficial. It lets you integrate agentic coding features into web apps quite nicely. (In theory you could always hack your own thing together with Claude Code or Codex to achieve a similar effect but a cloud agent with an API saves a lot of effort.)
edit: Also Jules...
snark off:
I think the Google PMs should have coffee together and see if all of this sprawl makes any sense.