My totally uninformed outsider view is that Google lacks leadership that can set a direction and follow through with it. They're no longer capable or interested in shaking up the environment like they did with Gmail. I understand that Google is a large mature company now, but they also seem to be uninterested in steady-handed long-term maintenance of a lot of their products either.
I don't see any vision in Google's products other than "ad money printer go brrrr."
As has been said, a company's products end up mirroring its internal org/cooperation structure.
By that metric, measured against Google's recent product releases, Google's org/cooperation structure is broken.
It's tired to reiterate the 'launch and abandon product for promotion' incentives, but it also seems to go higher up.
Individual teams at Google are amazing, and build amazing features, but the company as a whole whole seems incapable of knitting those features together into a coherent product.
I worked with great developers at Google during my short stint there (part of the Jan 23 layoffs) but the management structure gets so thick and tangled once you get above feature teams.
I don't see any vision in Google's products other than "ad money printer go brrrr."