So, here's the hidden secret to Google: every inexplicably stupid move they've ever done can be described in terms of promo packets.
Every duplicate messaging app? That's someone's promo packet item.
Every ground-up incompatible API rewrite? Also a promo packet.
Google produces new work purely to satisfy itself. Their hierarchy forms its own internal economy where promotions are purchased with headline-grabbing actions that fool managers into thinking they provide business value. We'll call this "Googlestan".
Yes, this occasionally causes problems in the external, "real" economy. Writing message apps as disposable products means you don't have an answer to iMessage or Whatsapp. Breaking APIs every 3 months makes Google Cloud a nonstarter for anything other than easily-migrated guest OSes with a more sensible deprecation policy.
But that's how Google was built, and how Google will continue to be built, because all hierarchies have a rule zero: self-preserve. You cannot build a new Google without disenfranchising the people who currently know how to game the current Google, and those people will instinctively fight against an engineering culture they do not understand.
The only exceptions to this are the core economic vehicles between Googlestan and the outside world: Search, Chrome, and Android. Note how each one of these products have a dramatically more conservative roadmap, with a reasonably minimized number of breaking changes. Hell, Chrome specifically calls breaking changes "interventions", because they're that serious about not making them. These products form a moat around Googlestan that protects the country from invaders, so they themselves are isolated from the kinds of people who would gank them for the sake of a promo packet.
[0] If you're wondering, "how does Google internally handle breaking changes everywhere without boiling the ocean"... the answer is that they have an automated ocean-boiling machine that lets them rewrite the entire Google code corpus whenever an API breaks.
Every duplicate messaging app? That's someone's promo packet item.
Every ground-up incompatible API rewrite? Also a promo packet.
Google produces new work purely to satisfy itself. Their hierarchy forms its own internal economy where promotions are purchased with headline-grabbing actions that fool managers into thinking they provide business value. We'll call this "Googlestan".
Yes, this occasionally causes problems in the external, "real" economy. Writing message apps as disposable products means you don't have an answer to iMessage or Whatsapp. Breaking APIs every 3 months makes Google Cloud a nonstarter for anything other than easily-migrated guest OSes with a more sensible deprecation policy.
But that's how Google was built, and how Google will continue to be built, because all hierarchies have a rule zero: self-preserve. You cannot build a new Google without disenfranchising the people who currently know how to game the current Google, and those people will instinctively fight against an engineering culture they do not understand.
The only exceptions to this are the core economic vehicles between Googlestan and the outside world: Search, Chrome, and Android. Note how each one of these products have a dramatically more conservative roadmap, with a reasonably minimized number of breaking changes. Hell, Chrome specifically calls breaking changes "interventions", because they're that serious about not making them. These products form a moat around Googlestan that protects the country from invaders, so they themselves are isolated from the kinds of people who would gank them for the sake of a promo packet.
[0] If you're wondering, "how does Google internally handle breaking changes everywhere without boiling the ocean"... the answer is that they have an automated ocean-boiling machine that lets them rewrite the entire Google code corpus whenever an API breaks.