Just because a company is 99% one thing, doesn’t mean that the 1% remaining don’t have moments of real genius. What it does mean however is that when those real genius moments happen, the company isn’t in a good position to capitalize on it (ala Xerox or Kodak mentioned previously, but there are so many more).

Because that's the hallmark of business-minded people being at the helm and not engineers, which has been an issue for Google for a long time: the greatest inventions ever seen will be squandered in terms of the org itself because management can't see beyond the next few quarters and won't invest properly in it.

He said that Xerox was not commercially successful with software or GUIs, and Kodak wasn't successful with digital cameras.

In spite of Xerox labs having pioneered the windowed OS GUI with mouse and Kodak having built the first portable mass-market digital camera.

They wouldn't have needed to enshittify or degrade their products to be successful with that, they just failed for other reasons.