This is so glaringly apparent as a user. I think Google makes some fantastic products, but the number of "This has to be so exceedingly easy to fix, but Google just doesn't give a damn" issues I've hit is crazy.
Here's one simple one: the number of volume steps in Android is only 16: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/37035441 . This means that the difference between off and the lowest level volume can be pretty big if you're trying to be quiet, e.g. avoid waking someone in the same room. I almost wish they would just close issues with a "We don't give a shit" resolution status.
I don't think it is as simple as a singular person or a single room saying "I don't give a shit". It's a matter of prioritization. (In this particular case, even from a UX perspective alone, you could argue that increasing friction in sharing could net-net hurt the average user.)
I don't think Google (if we can anthropomorphize it at all) is blind to this general phenomenon though--it's a trade-off you have to make about what company you want to be. Is it better for you to invest resources into incremental improvements to polish the final 2% or try again and maybe make a breakthrough. You have to look it from multiple angles too: are you going to attract the most talented people giving them such gruntwork or will they quit? Is there any meaningful incremental business you could get from polishing Android (remember, polished Android is more expensive and has to compete head-on with a company whose focus is to polish and is best set up to do so). It's complicated. There's a place for multiple models.
> Is it better for you to invest resources into incremental improvements to polish the final 2% or try again and maybe make a breakthrough.
I would argue that maybe they should try Option 1, instead of sunsetting their Nth chat app, or migrating everyone from Google Music (which would very much benefit from some polish) onto Google Youtube Music (which I don't understand the value of for me as a listener.)
"Nothing works" is certainly not an accurate description of the reality (It's more like 80-90% works just great). As for who cares, your colleagues certainly do (there are limits on how much "potato and meat" you can mix with talent before messing the recipe up). Also note that the companies we are talking about here are not in the technology business, they are in the empire business, so they certainly care about who gets to help control the empire and who defects to a competitor.
I could buy the "either/or" proposition with other companies, but not with Google. They have so much money and so many people they could easily (a) fix lots of these things that drive users nuts and (b) make a "breakthrough" (but as other commenters have pointed out, if their "breakthrough" is another chat app, maybe they should pull back).
They quite simply don't incentivize teams to fix this shit.
It's not just a resource limit issue. It's more akin to designing the tax code. At the top, you have to design a performance review system that trickles down to 100k people who operate in different parts of your organization without special casing too much to incentivize the desired behavior (special casing or discretion may add complexity, potential unfairness and bias, or effectively segment the company reducing internal mobility or make some products less attractive drawing away subsets of talent you may need there). To make the matters more difficult it's not like the CEO gets to write it on a tablet; as with the tax code, it is not designed in a vacuum, and the people who write it have existing political incentives too. Life is complicated.
Here's one simple one: the number of volume steps in Android is only 16: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/37035441 . This means that the difference between off and the lowest level volume can be pretty big if you're trying to be quiet, e.g. avoid waking someone in the same room. I almost wish they would just close issues with a "We don't give a shit" resolution status.