I find it amazing, having observed the era when Google was an up-and-coming website, that they’ve gotten so far off track. I mean, this must have been what it felt like when IBM atrophied.

But, they hired the best and brightest of my generation. How’d they screw it up so bad?

They sell ads and harvest attention. This is working as designed, it just happens that they don’t care about customers till they leave. So use something else instead.

Did they hire the best and brightest or did they hire a subset of people

- willing to work on ads - who were successful in their process

and everyone just fell for the marketing?

Corporations are basically little dictatorships, so those best and brightest must do what those above them say or be sacked.

Incentives.

The capitalist system is broken. Incentives to maximise stockholder values will maximise stockholder values very well. Everything else will go to shit. This is true about everything from user experience to the environment to democracy.