Face it, they have hit the "Yahoo phase" of their company life. It was a good, long run. All that remains is buying larger and larger successful startups and grinding them in to dust.
But the the "sunsetting" of projects good or bad, random shotgun approaches to everything, super awesome islands of product that slowly get bled dry... it is a failure of management structure, not just management.
I don't know the guts of Google, but I imagine there are 500 VPs (or equivalent) each with their pet project, each trying to curry favor with the boss who sent an email blast to "go big on Gemini". It feels like many teams just dropped their old busted projects and moved on to the new hotness, to hell with the customers, consistency or revenue. The only metric now is "Gemini engagement".
But the the "sunsetting" of projects good or bad, random shotgun approaches to everything, super awesome islands of product that slowly get bled dry... it is a failure of management structure, not just management.
I don't know the guts of Google, but I imagine there are 500 VPs (or equivalent) each with their pet project, each trying to curry favor with the boss who sent an email blast to "go big on Gemini". It feels like many teams just dropped their old busted projects and moved on to the new hotness, to hell with the customers, consistency or revenue. The only metric now is "Gemini engagement".