The customer isn't even the board, it's the stockholders. This has always been true though. I was at Netscape when the end came and for the last couple years of their life, before Mozilla spun out as independent, they would have quarterly layoffs to bridge the gap between what they told analysts they were targeting for the quarter and the numbers they actually produced.

The users and even the employees took a back seat to making Wall St. happy.

It was ever so, and so only the naive put their faith in mega corporations. Google was extremely useful for about 10 years from around 2002 through about 2012, but even then they were conspiring with Apple to suppress wages for top web browser and other programmers, and they were abusing their overwhelming search monopoly to gain illegal advantage in email, web browsers, and office productivity apps.

Fuck them. They were always evil, but the trade off was better back then when their evil gave us useful stuff and not AI slop. For over a decade that trade off hasn't been worth it.