I was talking to a friend currently working for Waymo (an Alphabet subsidiary) about this issue and he mentioned that there’s a strong incentive to launch products because that can be used to lobby for promotions and raises, but very little incentive to support them long term unless it’s Gmail or one of the other flagships.

If everyone wants to make stuff and nobody wants to run or improve stuff, it makes sense that this would happen. It just seems like such a relatively easy issue to fix.