> Am I just wrong that Google isn't suffering from me hating them?
No, I think you're right that Google is suffering in the long term. It's a combination of measurement difficulty and agency problems - there's no way for the VP of the product to get a credible signal about whether a change was good or not other than by looking at something incontrovertible like DAUs. You might try to introduce a metric like "user happiness" but the design space of such metrics is so large that a misaligned product manager could always use it to shove a bad change through.
Kind of like we all know GDP is a bad metric for human flourishing, but everything else feels even worse.
No, I think you're right that Google is suffering in the long term. It's a combination of measurement difficulty and agency problems - there's no way for the VP of the product to get a credible signal about whether a change was good or not other than by looking at something incontrovertible like DAUs. You might try to introduce a metric like "user happiness" but the design space of such metrics is so large that a misaligned product manager could always use it to shove a bad change through.
Kind of like we all know GDP is a bad metric for human flourishing, but everything else feels even worse.