What successful product have they launched since 2008, when they embraced DoubleClick’s management culture? Ads bring in a lot of revenue, scaling with the general internet-using population growth, but they also seem to have made Google’s management incapable of thinking about products which are not immediately, wildly successful at selling tons of ads or harvesting data for ad targeting.

It’s fortunate that they’ve been able to sustain the ad business but the billions they’ve spent developing new products nobody wanted to use had given them the air of decline, our age’s IBM where they have a lot of existing users but few people expect a new success even if the finance guys reliably get fabulous bonuses.

That is from an user perspective. From a shareholder perspective they are doing just fine.

Yes, from an user point of view, Google sucks. But it's making money. Probably it's hard for a company to achieve behemoth status and still do nice things.

Your original claim wasn’t scoped to shareholder returns, but even as a shareholder (which I happen to be) throwing away their reputation & goodwill is a concern. Only a few businesses like ISPs have something like a natural monopoly insulating them from the long-term impacts of that loss. Saying it’s doing fine sounds a lot like the people saying it was good to have accountants in charge of IBM in the 90s, who were right until it was too late to recover.

The problem isn’t just size but business model: Apple does much better because they have never lost track of the need to have each user actively choose their products. The ad business is different since, say, a Maps user is not who gives Google revenue and that makes it easier not to respect them, with consequences which are not immediately coupled to revenue.