The issue with user interfaces and web apps like Google's properties with billions of users is that you cannot change the user interface significantly, period.

The issue with user interfaces and web apps like Google's properties with billions of users is that you cannot change the user interface significantly, period. Doing so will alienate many hundreds of millions of users that rely on that user interface to get work done every day, and to suggest they do that is kind of naive to the bigger picture. The apps mentioned in the article are business apps - if users really want to use Quip or Notion and their user interfaces instead of Google Apps - they can and sometimes do just use those instead. What Google had done occasionally is introduce new apps with a different user interface over the same data, like it did with it's then new email software Inbox a while back, but you can't just dramatically change the user interface paradigms of an existing application because it's not hip anymore. Hundreds of millions of people would then have to re-learn how to do the same thing in the new interface, and billions of dollars of productivity would be lost in training, Q&A, and brand equity. An example of this is Microsoft transition to the ribbon interface for Office Apps, which was super painful for organizations.