To me, the funny thing is that google could use brand awareness to engender trust. When I buy some new fangled toy, I often look for a trusted name, instead of something made overseas, with an incomprehensible name.
But it is almost the opposite. Fly by night names and resellers on amazon, are more stable than google. Some even have far better support!
Just bizarre.
Someone should tell google that outside of SV, people hate iterate often, hate fast change, and just want security updates and bug fixes, no feature changes, no gui improvements, just stable stable stable for decades.
And google could do it so easily! Shared dev platforms, long term support branches, they could own the world.
And they could open source old hardware firmwares at end of life. Strutt and preen about how they are the beautiful peacock of the OSS world, and do their best to keep old hardware from the trash.
Instead they are so short sighted, they can't see beyond a quarter. ChatGPT and its potential was well known, google is a subject matter expert, and yet they were astonished at the progess and press and bing?!?!
They have no vision, no look ahead, trash their brand, destroy their image, piss off consumers, and for what?
To dabble in things they well know will shut down tomorrow anyhow. Gee, great.