Anyone have a sense of whether the launch-and-abandon behavior actually works for Google, or is it more like a trust-funder whose checks keep coming no matter how much partying they do?
Not sure if anyone at Google really cares about Google in general. And who could blame them?
I have no idea if this is actually true and/or if it was ever true based on personal experience (never worked at Google) but I've heard it repeatedly including from some seemingly reliable sources.
Apple's approach has been a disaster recently with the glorified (and polished) beta test kit "Vision Pro" and the cancelled Apple Car.
If Apple has embraced the Vision Pro as an experimental product, they probably could have released it with an order of magnitude or two less expenditure. But Apple does not experiment in the marketplace, they release solid polished products that have been in a sense validated by their competitors (Blackberry etc).
When it comes to innovation, an experimental approach like Google's is key. If you don't have that culture, you will get left behind. Apple is in a precarious position: the iPhone is over 15 years old, becoming "my parent's phone". They're not a player in AI and the car project failed. How will they capture the next generation?
Apple's recent updates to iTunes broke basic functionality like playlists. I'm not sure "refined" is the right description, perhaps "more conservative but just as broken".
Then people project that approach onto other co's like Google, that have a more experimental bent, and get upset when experiments have undesirable results (of course Google deserves some blame here for how they frame things).
You could blame them for launching separate apps in the first place but hindsight is 20/20. I can also agree that the migration should have been smoother. Not migrating listening history is definitely an annoyance.
Not really, Google Music and Youtube Music were very distinct products at least at the consumption end.