google makes products, they mostly suck at making platforms, and their most notable platform (android) was purchased, though one can argue gsuite/workspace as a platform, but one might also argue that its more just an amalgamation of projects.
One can see this from the failure of google+ (and killing off beloved apps, like reader on its altar, when I would argue if they are thinking platform, the idea is to make any app insert data into the platform, you don't want to push away users, you want to get them using the platform with them even knowing it).
Or their disjointed messaging strategy for many years (which might not even matter, they seemingly have given up on it?). It shouldn't matter what messaging app someone uses, let it use a common platform. Spend the money on figuring out how to make them use a common platform, because killing their app just pushes them away and you are not guaranteed that they will move to your new app vs something else. Moving their old app to your new platform, again, keeps them as users, increases the value of the platform (as more users are inserting dfata into it) which makes it more valuable to others to do the same. One might have different apps geared towards differ things (someone might be happy with just text messaging, another might want video and text messaging, but if you kill the first guy's app and expect him to move, he might just as quickly move to whatsapp or something else).
The fruit company still has an internal culture, especially in hardware-focused teams, with a relentless focus on shipping products followed by iterative refinement.
They are still milking the product they launched 20 years ago, doing slight periodic updates to match innovations of others with few years delay. They are about as good at making new products as Google and Facebook.
I realize it's a strained equivalence, but Apple makes a lot of money violating EU anticompetitive laws. Their stranglehold over app distribution is not entirely dissimilar to ransome.
Sounds awesome. But they achieved it by basically harwiring specific RAM to specific CPU. It's awesome that they made a product, but there's no extensibility and since it's internal apple innovation it's basically a technological dead end. Nobody can build anything upon this and there's nothing to build. Even a cool $2k laptop you can run small LLM on is basically a closed off expensive toy. Much like iPhone.
Technology will grow in parallel and surpass it fairly quickly like the Android phones did. Only brand loyalty in US holds this thing still propped up long term.
Lots of talented people, and decent hardware, once the stupid politics was overcome.
But.
In all the time I worked there, we never managed to get "join my friends" feature get made. Trying to join your friends in a game was so fucking hard. You'd think being a social company, who's whole point is connecting people, this would be the first feature.
But no.
Threads is the only product they have launched in the last 5 years that anything close to successful. Even then it only launched because management ignored it, let them get an MVP out the door before swelling the size of the team from ~8(?) to >>2k
The time to fun was also waaay too high. it got better towards the end, but in 2020-2023 it would take ages to log in, update, load, get kicked out, reboot and then join.
Oculus was shipping hardware/software before the Facebook acquisition, and proceeded to slowly bleed out post-acquisition. We shipped a few decent VR headsets in the middle there (Quest 1, 2 and 2s/3), but most of the other initiatives within Meta's reality labs withered on the corporate vine...
