Well, if we look back to those times, it was effective strategy to spray good money to keep talents occupied with dead end products because access to cheap VC m

Well, if we look back to those times, it was effective strategy to spray good money to keep talents occupied with dead end products because access to cheap VC money was plentiful due to prosperous decade of zero interest giving anyone ability to compete the slow moving behemoth with innovation as the crowd as hungry to accept new and shiny. Google also managed to lure away talents out of promising places to snuff any competition risks. Now that zero interest days of prosperity is effectively gone, economy and money is tight, everything easy had already been captured by Big Tech… now is the risk free time to ditch the dead weights. Anything easy under the sun has now 20+ clones, expectations are immense, crowd are cautious to accept anything new, no supply of long time cash to burn due ti cautious VCs & non-zero interest rates, plenty regulations to block all privacy shenanigans or other known loopholes. We forget that, the great ones(except M$) were all built in era of lax digital & privacy era and easy supply of cash. Anyone having any idea was showered with cash. Now those days are over. Any threat of competition is minimal. If I were google, this is the perfect time to shed some weight given all of the above.