I feel like google crossed some point about a decade ago where they stopped making innovative stuff and started focusing on squeezing revenue out of everything else. A bit like when Carly turned HP into a printing/ink racket. Both the decline of google maps and the inability of google to filter out noise from their search results are strong indicators of this for me. Scrambling to field a competing product to maintain relevancy in this emerging market would be consistent with this assessment as well. The old google would have fielded the product first because it was useful, but the current google seems to do it because they don't want to lose revenue.