Google has destroyed, or at least nullified, a generation of engineering talent with their unambitious, checkbox-resume based advancement scheme. We should all expect more from a supposedly engineering-driven organization.
Interestingly, the lifetime of a company is directly tied to the attention span of its customers. As long people come to the store asking for Coca Cola the company will endure, so this is probably generational. Enterprise software sticks around, so does Oracle. Internet consumer technology promotes attention span that's measured in seconds, Google can come crashing down quite suddenly.
Coca Cola is sticky through brand advertising, business deals, product placement, etc. Pretty much all that money spent by people on bottles of the sugary water was pumped into marketing, not into manufacturing. Over decades this created a very firm image in the people's heads, and the only way to dislodge it is to create a new brand for younger consumers (which Coca Cola will purchase as soon as it shows traction).
ERP software is deeply ingrained into business processes, removing it is akin to removing a person's neural system. The only way to dislodge that is to address up-and-coming companies, having them build their processes around a new paradigm.
You can't just beat any of this via superior quality product, they have "a moat" [1]
Google doesn't have that loyalty, and it's not that deeply ingrained. They ride on their default placement in Chrome/iOS and on the search result quality (which stems from quality engineering and superior scale yielding large data sets). If someone used NLP to build a more relevant search engine (of course serving more relevant ads), it won't be long before that new search engine starts using their revenue to pay higher $$ amount to hardware manufacturers to make a new engine the default. It's a shaky ground, and it's why Google is re-inventing itself and AI company - if they don't then someone else will. There is some strength in Google's name itself, but I'm not sure it can match to the visceral reaction to an addictive sugary drink.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/economicmoat.asp
The problem is there are too many Googlers, so they keep inventing busywork projects that don't need to exist (like reinventing messaging over and over) because otherwise there's nothing for them to do. The ideas:people ratio is completely out of whack.
Why are there too many Googlers? Because Google would rather spend money on hiring than returning excess profit to investors.
Why would they do that? Because their stock voting structure prevents investors from forcing their hand, and because of an essentially delusional culture/belief amongst senior management that they hire the world's smartest people, that they will never run out of ideas, that there's always more to do etc etc. Management can't accept that Google might have tapped out, ideas-wise, and maybe its natural size is smaller than today not bigger. It takes quite some humility to say "we're spinning our wheels, the profit we generate could be better deployed elsewhere" and they can't do it.
Watching this process play out gave me a new appreciation for why shares have voting rights.
There's lots of good examples of this [1], but from one particuarly recent example [2]:
> I should have done the opposite: figure out what the promotion committee wants, and do that work exclusively.
> I adopted a new strategy. Before starting any task, I asked myself whether it would help my case for promotion. If the answer was no, I didn’t do it.
> My quality bar for code dropped from, “Will we be able to maintain this for the next 5 years?” to, “Can this last until I’m promoted?” I didn’t file or fix any bugs unless they risked my project’s launch. I wriggled out of all responsibilities for maintenance work.
When you look at their products through this lens, it starts to make sense, such as continually launching "new" communication apps that might as well be from different companies.
I wonder if, and how much, this plays into the vast number of contractors Google pays to do that very "grunge work".
It's a bunch of very talented, bored engineers who realize that launching a product, even if it fails, is better for their career and resume than doing grunge work that might be better for google's bottom line
Basically resume driven development and Google hasn't done anything to prevent it. They probably don't care, they'd rather have them wasting money at Google than leaving due to boredom and potentially creating a startup or going to a competitor that might disrupt Google somehow.