For companies of this size this is the norm, not the exception.

Google's sole purpose now is to increase profit by > 15% till eternity. No innovative tech can give >15% growth in profit every year like a clockwork. So they attracted bunch of number pushers who kept on putting more and more ads in youtube and search. They started chasing Amazon or Apple in Cloud or Phone hardware. They became 100% competition focussed and completely ignored their strength. They completely forgot that they are sitting on the next goldmine like LLM. It baffles me the the company which invented Transformer and has the worlds largest index can not build something like ChatGPT. But that is not going increase their profit in the next quarterly earning.

They say they have a better ChatGPT, but it’s too dangerous to let into the hands of the genpop.

Growing past thousands of people is very hard to do “correctly”. Maybe it’s not even possible.

Large organizations are pulled very strongly toward mediocrity.

What's unique about Google is not that they ended up there. It's how they avoided it for so long.

It was a response to real issues that had to be addressed. When 3 different teams ship 3 different chat apps over the course of just 5 years, that’s the kind of thing that typically signals more leadership and better organization is needed.

Doesn't seem like they've addressed it yet based on the Meet/Hangout fiasco that is still unravelling. Mid-2010's Google was already showing signs of corporate lethargy.

That's because of something called the institutional imperative https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287430

Natural end stage of organization growth.