This is exactly why companies' fortunes wax and wane - not just in the software space, but also in other industries.

While some of the big bets may pay off against all most others' expectations, these kinds of distractions allow others to build and establish compelling propositions that meet current customer needs and grow rapidly themselves.

The venn diagram between "People who use interfaces" and "People who make interfaces" has always been damn close to two separate circles.

Google's interfaces are unbelievably bad. They have so many buttons which won't let you open in a new tab, or they'll only let you look at one thing in a new time and require three clicks to get to an identical part of another account's account.

That's just a microcosm of the bigger problem. Facebook for businesses' interface is a nightmare to use because what are marketers going to do? Not advertise on Facebook? Google is the same.

This wouldn't be so bad if other platforms, like Bing or Pinterest/Tiktok didn't then copy the bigger one as if it was worth copying in the first place.

Of course there is a disconnect between what the C-Suite want and what the users want - they don't need to use their stuff as part of their everyday life.

There's another aspect to progression in 'new' developments and that is the obstructive use of patents. It's all very well having an idea and patenting the process but if you don't know how to achieve/complete/develop the action.....

At least the lawyers and patent trolls might get an opportunity to extract their share and distribute the riches accordingly.

"customer" -- zero

"product(s)" -- one

....in Rupert Goodwins' article. And this also tells you something about Google and FB. Commercial success is a TWO-SIDED outcome......there's the people who invent (or develop) products, and there's the people who buy them (because the product satisfies a need).

....and obviously, there are very few people out there who need (huge processing power plus ugly headsets).....it doesn't look like a mass market.

....and (less obviously) there are an increasing number of customers who wonder about the downsides of doing business with Google or FB.....irrespective of the customer's need for the service.

....and finally, and not mentioned, there's the perennial question about "lock in" -- the move from running the software locally....to paying a monthly fee (forever). This last item seems to me to be a killer feature of open source, compared with the above.

Whilst they once strived for industrial and intellectual excellence Big Tech has simply moved on to being Poltically and Financially motivated at an extreme level. Zuckerberg and Google aren't constantly being sent to court because of engineering failures.

Big tech now appears to simply be a huge stream of endless Pipe Dreams, constantly bombarding us with product X, or idea Z. And even though there have been huge advances in technology I get the feeling that very few of them are being used for anything other than the rubbing of personal egos.

I can't/won't speak for Linus as I have absolutely no understanding of his personal objectives. He's a strange egg that is not easy to decipher.

Google's strategy of letting a thousand flowers bloom is a recipe for a backyard filled with weeds. Both these things are illnesses of the rich; you have the luxury of doing things badly for a long time if the cash keeps flowing.

...

But to get there, means engineering a way to make the good of the end user more relevant than maximising revenue. That may seem utopian, but it was once the stuff of corporate will.

It goes beyond just corporate world-view of throwing a lot of stuff at the wall and then seeing what sticks.

I seem to remember a former Googler commenting fairly recently that the reason Google has a million chat apps is that their internal progression model heavily encourages you to be involved in "Big Bang" releases. So the new chat/video call/Stadia project launches, half the devs then put in for promotion and move to the next Big Thing TM . Their previous "baby" then founders for a couple of years until it gets culled. It's not simply the result of a sober, considered policy of letting people explore and experiment (their "20% time") - it's an incentive to rehash solved-problems to tick a career-progression box.

It's a perverse incentive that's it's very, very difficult to get promoted or progress simply by being a good engineer and fixing bugs or sticking with a product and being a guru in it. You need to have "a thing" under your belt - which incentivises otherwise (probably) perfectly good engineers to go off and "innovate" a million variations on chat, video calling or some other solved problem.

This isn't necessarily a broader culture issue and more a misguided HR/management policy which could be solved with a minor tweak to how they conduct annual reviews. It's no secret that plenty of workplaces have seen productivity tumble or quality issues introduced after a listless manager (who usually doesn't understand the work well enough) decides to introduce some KPIs and the workforce then optimises their workflow to match those KPIs, and stops worrying about secondary or maintenance tasks which aren't being measured.

Meta wants everyone to work in the metaverse, and is denying the awkward fact that strapping shoeboxes to our heads is completely irrelevant to our day jobs. But guess how long a career at Meta will be for anyone who says so.

Senior management in big corporations certainly have some heavy-duty reality insulation, combine that with the perpetual circle jerk of mutual arse kissing, a cult like belief in the corporate propaganda and you have an infallible recipe for doing stupid way beyond the point when a face-saving course reversal is tenable.

It seems to me that the problems of Google and Meta stem from having too much money.

When your annual turnover is measured in such large numbers, it is difficult to deliver the growth that shareholders both expect and demand. And since both companies are operating in what are essentially mature markets, the prospects for expanding their existing operations are limited. Added to which, when your companies span such a wide field of disciplines and markets, almost any attempt to buy into a promising growth area attracts the gaze of anti-monopoly regulators.

In case anyone has developed the false impression that I am feeling sorry for these outfits, or trying to excuse their actions, it would be useful to look to the past. In previous decades the solution was to break up such empires. Could it be that the time has come to separate the Goo from the Gle (and the You from the Tube), the Me from the Ta and the Ama from the Zon.

Though I have a sneaking suspicion that such a breakup would just increase the value of their owners' share holdings.

The article fails to mention how the same thinking plagues the Open Source world, too, in MANY, MANY cases. On prime example: Mozilla Firefox.

Sure it's FOSS but Mozilla appear to be hell-bent on proving that "irrelevance" is achievable by those holding the reigns of a FOSS product, too, and, in fact, that they can mimic Google in removing every feature anybody actually wants and adding tonnes and tonnes of cruft that nobody asked for.

All of this – whether in the corporate world or without – stems from the same fundamental truth: nobody, today, achieves a powerful role while retaining a moderate attitude or an understanding that just-being-brilliant-at-something is enough. The ONLY way to the top is to fully subscribe to the cult of owning everything, always increasing everything, beating everything. And, of course, everything must be maximally monetized – just a fair profit is not enough.

But these are just several pieces of FOSS software lashed together with a proprietary API and billing software aren't they?

And sometimes if a piece of FOSS software used by a Big Tech corporation in is cloud is very lucky it will get a few pesos thrown in its general direction, for contributing several billion dollars to its quarterly profit figures.