You get promoted at Google not for improving and maintaining great products, but for building and releasing a product. This is why you see them building seeming

You get promoted at Google not for improving and maintaining great products, but for building and releasing a product. This is why you see them building seemingly competing products for the exact same sector (Duo and Allo anyone?). Someone leads the project, they get dozens of engineers to work on it, it gets released and announced at Google I/O. The manager who got the project completed gets promoted, the product ends up languishing. There's no incentive to maintain a product, or improve a product, so Google just puts out an endless series of half baked products and abandons them, while existing products are barely touched. If their only real goal is to produce new executives and higher level managers, the system works great.