Technology

All those closings and new launches also helps with reducing that pesky user base, get burnt a few times by Google and Microsoft looks much better.

The moment Google did the alphabet thing in order to preempt ftc breakups, it was over.

I degoogled in 2017 (I run my own Synology cloud now with off-site backup to AWS glacier) and while it wasn't cheap, it was absolutely the best decision.

I met someone at a party who works at Google. She told me that too many decisions are made by engineers instead of like a higher up product person.

That's not contradicting what you said. Others have also said there's a lot more rewards for making something "new" rather than maintaining something.

It's a failure of Google management

Microsoft has been trying to be more proactive about this: they changed all their documentation to say Entra ID instead of Azure Active Directory...before actually changing Azure AD to be called Entra ID...

They do, but I think Google is worse about it because it’s all random back and forth. Most of Microsoft’s recent changes have been renaming Office something or Azure something to Microsoft something. Often the product name itself hasn’t changed, or when it does it’s usually grouping a bunch of products with separate names under one product line with related functionality (Defender didn’t rename, but it also absorbed a lot, Purview and Entra were new absorbed a lot of other product names). Teams was Lync and then Skype for Businesses, but I actually think the simplifying and getting away from the Skype branding was a good move.

Microsoft also seems to have a more thought out process for new products in the first place and doesn’t have the reputation for abandoning things all the time.