Close... it's because they're a monopoly. They're not really lazy, plenty of people at Google work hard, but monopolies over time lose their ability to innovate

Close... it's because they're a monopoly. They're not really lazy, plenty of people at Google work hard, but monopolies over time lose their ability to innovate or to compete on quality. They are only able to focus and organize around one thing: protecting the cash cow. So with Google that's the search advertising business and as a calcifying monopoly they will struggle to do anything else. They know that AI's potentially a threat but in an abstract, marketing-mutating sort of way their ad sales juggernaut can't understand. So they will throw a lot of money at AI, execs will make announcements stuffed with words like Bold and Transformation, and then they'll get sub-par results. This time around they ended up chasing random internal DEI goals or something instead of building a good product, and who knows what flub it will be next time. The direct comparison is Microsoft's inability to win at mobile, no matter how much cash they burned. Similarly mobile was kind of this existential threat at the perimeter of the cash cow, which was enterprise Windows. So they threw gobs of money at it, but because they had become dysfunctional outside of directly preserving the cash cow, they couldn't make stuff stick. Your Pocket PC (literally they called it a PC!) is a clunker but hey it can connect to an Exchange server! Now let's buy Nokia and run it into the ground!