I think it's a dichotomy where half of the thinking is bonus-oriented as you describe, and the other half is them wrongly assuming all users think/work as they

I think it's a dichotomy where half of the thinking is bonus-oriented as you describe, and the other half is them wrongly assuming all users think/work as they do and will thoroughly evaluate before making a meaningful decision to purchase or put into production (because surely everyone has massive SRE/QA budgets and only does 10 hours of relevant work a week and the rest is for deep optimization). Thus you get the outcome of releasing beta products and then be surprised when either the product is a disappointment, or it gets yanked later due to poor/unideal adoption. > I'm not sure what you're saying about sharing blame, that these products are too popular? I'm not sure that's a sufficient reason, but it would certainly explain Google's overarching product strategy through the decades. I'm not sure if it's sufficient cause either, I just try to peel back the onion to understand more then just "those people are dumb profiteers with simple minds making simple mistakes". Also I think it yields some unique insight into my own work/coding/life when I identify the deeper subconscious flaws in product development.