It's all a shortcoming of management and incentives. They have plenty of smart people, plenty of amazing tech, but they are 100% failing to deploy the right people on building the right products for the right customers.
They also don't give enough polish to their products.
For example, the Nexus 5 (2013!) had a bug - if you took 7 photos in quick succession, it wouldn't save photo 3 and 4. For example, you're photographing someone doing a dance, and you want a photo on each beat, so you tap the shutter to the beat of the music.
On a 2022 Pixel 7, 10 years on...... The exact same bug.
In some cases it's even worse and they are outright hostile to certain groups. Google Maps has been crippled for years for anyone using it outside of internet service. One of the most basic features, saving a point on a map, is completely broken. Route finding and offline maps are unreliable in rural areas.
I get that people who rarely leave major cities are Google's favorite and most profitable user demographic, but there are still many millions of people outside of that group. Google can get away with sneering at them while they have a profitable monopoly, but once they breaks up they are in deep trouble. Their culture of half-baked and frequently shuttered projects is so ingrained at this point it's going to be enormously difficult to change.
