A common way of thinking at Google and other big tech companies is that you're not building for your current users. Your current users will hate it if you move or change the color of a single button in Gmail. Also cue the "faster horse" aphorism. You're building for the next billion users instead.

But of course, the problem with Google is that they already have basically every person on the planet as their customer, and their ideas for how the future should look like aren't exactly transformative. The Gmail UX in 2026 is not radically different / better than in 2016. The same goes for Chrome - there's a lot of changes under the hood, but the user experience is essentially the same. Android phones have better cameras and displays compared to ten years ago, but the software functionality is once again very similar.

So I guess they're in the same spot as Microsoft, trying to innovate in a mildly user-hostile way, looking for an audience that doesn't exist?

> But of course, the problem with Google is that they already have basically every person on the planet as their customer

Yeah, this is partly a story of finance, where companies want to be seen as "growth" companies... even when all the low-hanging fruit of "get more customers" is mostly gone.