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When Google first appeared on the tech scene, a lot of us were excited to have a great tool for search that actually kicked back relevant things you needed. And they toyed with great experiments, most of which are all dead except for the most boring of them: the traditional productivity suite of email, documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. (For the record, I have never seen or heard of a single person in my entire knowledge of Google ever use Slides.) Of course, Chromebooks and Chrome as well (but...).
Their missteps are so public and feel so egregious, and that's what this article is underscoring. Great and fun things that clearly they are not able to monetize, no matter how much they throw into it. Yet the things that they go all in on are usually things no one actually needs or wants, such as Google Plus and Stadia. Instead, as again pointed out by the article, Google puts out great experiments that people love, and the management and marketing at Google simply are never able to get their shit together to monetize those things in ways to make the products profitable enough to keep around, such as the article-mentioned Reader (which I am also still bitter about), and just destroying other great tools like Picasa to hoist less useful web-based generic experiences upon the user base they build up.
Google is really, truly, at this point so many years into their existence, an afterthought for most end users. When non-tech people say Google they mean Chrome almost 100% of the time. They mean a web browser. People still have and use yahoo.com and aol.com emails more than anyone thinks, and gmail might be Google's second most successful product after Chrome, but for a grand majority, Google = Chrome.
The Google Graveyard site exists for a reason. https://killedbygoogle.com/
