That may all be the case but then why has Google been failing to innovate and also maintain anything the past few years?
The past fews years we’ve seen Google products die and deteriorate. Search has gotten worse, they’ve killed dozens of products and services (even ones that they promised would be around for the long haul). GPhotos is no longer free (after putting most competitors out of business).
Google lack any institutional commitment and consistency to succeed at much these days. One only need to look at their recent past to see why everyone is skeptical. Maybe they will pull a rabbit from their hat but I’m not holding my breath.
That is all not to mention the pending real antitrust issues they are facing.
Search is so very bad. I tried to figure out what the largest MicroSD card was and was served ads and real results to buy fake 2tb cards from Amazon. Several searches were useless packed with ads and SEO spam. Only Reddit could tell me that the largest currently available card is 1tb.
I looked up "largest available microsd" and the first item was a pop up box that said the largest available one is 1TB. I put the same query into bing and the result as the same.
That's not to say that happen to you didn't happen. Information on the internet evolves rapidly and far from static. One problem is that people game Google with SEO. We end up with an arms race of people gaming signaling for information and Google search having to find different signals for information. The high noise to signal ratio is a very hard problem to solve.
I'm still salty about Google Reader, but they've innovated (Bard is the subject in the Op and a pretty big AI innovation) and maintained (Gmail, Docs, Chrome, Golang, Android) a bunch of stuff.
I wouldn't call any of those maintained... stagnated at best with degradation around the edges all around. For each one of those there are 10 projects Google has killed or let wither on the vine over the past 5 years.
The past fews years we’ve seen Google products die and deteriorate. Search has gotten worse, they’ve killed dozens of products and services (even ones that they promised would be around for the long haul). GPhotos is no longer free (after putting most competitors out of business).
Google lack any institutional commitment and consistency to succeed at much these days. One only need to look at their recent past to see why everyone is skeptical. Maybe they will pull a rabbit from their hat but I’m not holding my breath.
That is all not to mention the pending real antitrust issues they are facing.