Along with your thoughts, I feel that Google's problem has always been over-promising. (There's even comedy skits about it.)
That starts with the demonstrations which show really promising technology, but what eventually ships doesn't live up to the hype (or often doesn't ship at all.)
It continues through to not managing the products well, such as when users have problems with them and not supporting ongoing development so they suffer decay.
It finishes with Google killing established products that aren't useful to the core mission/data collection purposes. For products which are money makers they take on a new type of financially-optimised decay as seen with Search and more recently with Chrome and YouTube.
I'm all for sunsetting redundant tech, but Google has a self-harm problem.
The cynic in me feels that part of Google's desire to over-promise is to take the excitement away from companies which ship* what they show. This seems to align with Pichai's commentary, it's about appearing the most eminent, but not necessarily supporting that view with shipping products.
* The Verge is already running an article about what was faked in the Gemini demo, and if history repeats itself this won't be the only thing they mispresented.
That starts with the demonstrations which show really promising technology, but what eventually ships doesn't live up to the hype (or often doesn't ship at all.)
It continues through to not managing the products well, such as when users have problems with them and not supporting ongoing development so they suffer decay.
It finishes with Google killing established products that aren't useful to the core mission/data collection purposes. For products which are money makers they take on a new type of financially-optimised decay as seen with Search and more recently with Chrome and YouTube.
I'm all for sunsetting redundant tech, but Google has a self-harm problem.
The cynic in me feels that part of Google's desire to over-promise is to take the excitement away from companies which ship* what they show. This seems to align with Pichai's commentary, it's about appearing the most eminent, but not necessarily supporting that view with shipping products.
* The Verge is already running an article about what was faked in the Gemini demo, and if history repeats itself this won't be the only thing they mispresented.