Comment by _the_inflator

Disclosure: I am a member of an advisory board to Google and have some insights into internal aspects as well as decisions.

I really appreciate and acknowledge Google's innovations since their inception.

However I am also puzzled and stunned by their bogus product decisions. As far as I can say, and this is my personal opinion, Google has a lack of what I call portfolio management. Really. At the highest level there is no clear decision about product development as well as marketing.

Or, in other words: There is an overarching strategy, but under this there are many principalities that autonomously decide about their product portfolio.

This is by design. These principalities work independently of each other. They have partly conflicting products, no real corporate design so every product looks totally different, from old school and minimalistic Google Search look till AI and crypto bro inspired designs.

I don't want to go into details, but I was stunned the last time I got told by a high ranking Google exec, that they now do portfolio management and also consolidate the icons of the mobile apps, which means that they share the same look and feel and color scheme.

This gave us the red, blue, white buttons roughly 1-2 years ago, which didn't make any sense if you consider the individual app icon tied to its app, which partly didn't allow for the meaning of the app behind it.

That's why suddenly to us users a product gets killed, because of budget constraints or local decision making processes. An exec is running an experiment, so to say.

Paradoxically it isn't necessarily about earning money with these products, since Google is still extremely profitable which allows for all these "expensive" experiments.

My take is, that the exec responsible for the product doesn't hit the boss's KPIs with the new product, which of course aren't disclosed to the public, but amount to partly a very significantly high incentive aka pay check. We talk about millions, not a couple of bucks. Incentive works. Extremely well.

So yes, there is only Google, but if you consider the mental model of having several independently operating business units working together like independent companies in a holding and the holding usually doesn't care about your product as long as some boundaries aren't crossed and it hits the target KPIs, Google is fine with all its products.

I talked to many folks about this, and why are they not joining forces or aligning certain products to improve these significantly - it won't fly.

A senior developer from one of the US top banks once told me: "Why align or reuse code? We earn so much money, there is no need to minimize costs or even think about it, because that would only be waste of time. Instead we create product after product."

Don't judge different companies by the sorry state we are used to. ;)