>>120231I think it's probably a lot of things. Lots of people see Google as a dream job, so they're constantly hiring new people, but at the same time they're also constantly laying people off and people are quitting. The satirical image in the Bloomberg "AI Superstars" article kind of unintentionally hits it on the nose with their depiction of "Google AI Alums"; A lot of people join the company to pad their resume or to give themselves more credibility if they leave to form a startup. This churn through employees helps to explain why Google is constantly starting new projects and stopping old projects; people are not staying at the company for a stable career, so you inevitably have tons of different projects all doing their own thing throughout the company. When those people behind those projects leave, they fall apart and nobody is left with any attachment to keep them going. So that's one factor.
Another issue is that because they have all these different projects going on simultaneously, they likely have many unknowingly replicating each other's work throughout the company. Google's MO is that they believe small teams can get things done faster than a larger company with bureaucratic management; that was the main reason for Google restructuring itself into having a parent company, Alphabet, and then spinning off individual divisions into their own companies beneath Alphabet. I think that in and of itself was a somewhat interesting decision, but as a result there's no real focus to the company, and there isn't enough oversight from any managing body to deal with project scope and overlap. Like, you've got the Google DeepMind people there doing their own thing. There's those Meena people making a chatbot. There's the AI ethics researchers that are writing papers and trying to work on AI safety and alignment (to borrow a phrase from OpenAI). There's the Waymo people working on self-driving. There's the search engine people working on image categorization. There's Captcha. And so on, and so on. Replication and scope is a big issue, I think.
So, basically they've got:
1. Management focused on profitability, and not understanding the value of their employees
2. High employee turnover (Mandated layoffs and also resignations)
3. Projects failing due to employees leaving on a regular basis
4. Employees competing to get projects started and resources allocated to them
5. Management lacks any particular vision, so there is a lack of managerial oversight to deal with project scope and overlap
6. Where management does have vision, it's mostly focused on public image
People frequently like to compare Apple and Google, but I think this is a very big misunderstanding of how these companies operate. Apple is fully integrated and has contained project scope, with teams working together to ensure compatibility and over all cohesiveness. Google on the other hand is a collection of very disparate projects, all working on their own, with incidental compatibility. That is, when things work together, it's because there's some communication between projects, not because there's an over all vision of things working together on a fundamental level.