You’re right and thanks for the re-focus. I guess I don’t know what else people would expect? All the incentives are for a publicly traded company to focus on what makes money. If you want to work on R&D solely for the sake of R&D, there are other options (notably in the public sphere). Expecting a company to continually funnel money into cool, but ultimately unsuccessful (by business metrics) ventures seems confused.

To be clear, my argument isn’t that they should ignore profitability but that they could have multiple revenue models for different products, not to mention a better understanding of what it takes to succeed in different fields.

I’d use GCP as an example of the problem: we buy services but their sales guys showed up like “we’re Google, of course we’re the best” and put approximately as much effort into selling as they do for Gmail. AWS makes a ton of people available, listens to what you need (and actually ships it), and follows up. Guess who gets the sale? Anthos was a cool idea, lots of smart people worked on it, … and none of that matters if you give up after begging them to show up to sell it.