Outside looking in, Google seems nearly entirely unable to get people to work on things that aren’t new and shiny. Maintenance and polish get little or no atten

Outside looking in, Google seems nearly entirely unable to get people to work on things that aren’t new and shiny. Maintenance and polish get little or no attention, and half-assed when they give them any attention at all. Even Android suffers from this, though it’s big enough it trundles on regardless—the parts that get attention are things that can be treated as launches (UI overhauls and such—which usually are only half-baked as far as the developer-facing side, and don’t see much improvement after launch) Microsoft has the organizational ability to get their workers to give a shit about maintenance and polish, and take it seriously. They have plenty of trouble of their own (I am far from a MS fan) but they don’t suffer that particular pathology—they’re not consistently perfect at it, certainly, but they’re also not consistently totally unable to do it, as Google seem to be. [edit] to head off nitpicks, google does show an ability to focus on one big area, of course: ads/search. Though, ask anyone who uses their ad platform and I expect you’ll get a pile of complaints about shit that absolutely should not be as broken as it is. The parts that get ongoing attention are service reliability and anything that makes the revenue line measurable go up-and-right the instant it’s enabled.