[onion2k]

I think it largely stems from this very popular comment from a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19553840 From an external point of view certainly seems to explain a lot of Google's issues with the stagnation and death of many of it's products.

The fact that there have been plenty of other comments from Googlers to back it up since shows that, in some parts of Google at least, there's a grain of truth there. It might not be the whole story, many teams might be proud of their part, and many Googlers may not be focusing on promition and shiny new things, but that doesn't really matter to Google's users. What we see has been plenty of Google products being killed off, or left to rot. Now even Search has people complaining about it. Startups are getting traction competing against it. A decade ago that would have been unthinkable.

If you're right and teams in Google do actually care about the older, less shiny things they build then Google has a significant brand and reputation problem. If you're wrong then Google has a massive engineering culture problem. Either way, Google has a problem.