How does this apply to all the chat apps? Google chat was great, wouldn't redoing the tech and making apps for all platforms have captured more territory than changing every couple years? When you have network effect, it's just crazy to try to rebuild that network every couple years if the point is to grow.
It's not about capturing marketshare for the company, it's about capturing bullet points for your resume. Working on new stuff is valued much more highly than fixing old stuff, and you naturally move much faster with more impressive sounding accomplishments in the early days of a product.
I think the premise is that the culture/behaviors/tactics that allowed Google to capture new territory early on are hanging on past their usefulness, not the actual capturing of territory itself. Growing existing products wasn't the important thing before, so _now_ the incentive structure at Google is mis-aligned with capturing territory in that way.
