Let me rephrase: there is no central part of Google that could "declare a winner." Google is a bunch of small companies that happen to share office space and a treasury, and are all called Google for some reason.
That's nonsense. You said it yourself -- they share a treasury, if nothing else. Google has a CEO (Pichai). Alphabet has a CEO (Page). There are dozens of executives who control the myriad different little fiefdoms, but all of those people report to someone.
I'm certain that four random engineers don't get to make a new thing, slap the Google brand on it, and prominently sell it on the front page of the Google store without someone approving it first.
And even if that were the case, it's a pathology to be solved, not a reasonable justification for them to continue to be catastrophically bad at making consumer-facing products. If there's no one entity called "Google" that can stop them from releasing absolute garbage that they then never once update, then I'll just rephrase my complaint to "Google needs to come up with a single entity that can stop them from releasing absolute garbage that they then never update."
It's a model that predicts their behavior well, is what I meant. It "makes sense of" their decisions. It doesn't justify those decisions; of course they're awful decisions.
I'm doing kremlinology here: attempting to model an opaque organizational structure so that you can change your behavior to avoid its inferred structural inadequacies. Because any organization in need of kremlinology ain't gonna be able to change in response to even a top-down order to do so.
Google can't stop being catastrophically Balkanized, any more than IBM can stop being catastrophically monolithic, or Facebook can stop being catastrophically lackadaisical toward code-base quality. It's in their DNA: in the kind of people they have hired, who now choose who they hire, and will continue to be biased however they're biased even if a top-down order tries to push against those biases.
I'm certain that four random engineers don't get to make a new thing, slap the Google brand on it, and prominently sell it on the front page of the Google store without someone approving it first.
And even if that were the case, it's a pathology to be solved, not a reasonable justification for them to continue to be catastrophically bad at making consumer-facing products. If there's no one entity called "Google" that can stop them from releasing absolute garbage that they then never once update, then I'll just rephrase my complaint to "Google needs to come up with a single entity that can stop them from releasing absolute garbage that they then never update."