[skybrian]

I don't see Google Cloud as "giving up on being a platform." It's a different kind of platform, though!

Early Google initiatives also had a high failure rate. (Buzz, for example.)

My guess is that there are still Googlers trying to improve the web. Young people are idealistic, so why wouldn't they? But nowadays it's unlikely to be successful unless it's relatively uncontroversial infrastructure. (Some examples might be things like certificate transparency and QUIC, which became HTTP/3.)

Higher-profile initiatives to really change things often fail because they raise deep suspicion and resistance. They're certain to be misinterpreted in the worst possible way.

Also, significant changes affect vested interests. Some of those vested interests are internal.