I'm not sure what you mean. When Google shut down Stadia they refunded everybody everything, for instance.
Google generally seems to treat its users pretty well. As long as you can accept that free accounts don't come with any kind of customer service or recourse. And that it's going to shut down products that don't ultimately contribute to its bottom line, since it's a business.
Yes - all Stadia purchases were fully refunded - software and hardware (Chromecast and controllers).
Google also released a firmware update for the controllers allowing them to be used as generic Bluetooth controllers. It was the best Google product sunset I have experienced.
Google sure gets a ton of flack (and deservedly so) for unceremoniously axing beloved products that don't quite bring Google-scale revenue, but this sunset sounds beyond incredibly respectful to their users and really shines a positive light on them. The controller thing is such an unnecessary but trust-promoting thing to do!
"Certain behaviors of a corporation look very different from how they usually seem to behave" is most easily explained by:
{Google, Microsoft, Apple, Intel} is big enough so that {insert product here} operates a lot like an independent company, just with lots of automatic mind share (although that can backfire when the parent brand is devolving), access to top-tier lawyers, marketing, sales, etc people and practically infinite runway (as long as the bosses like what you do).
ChromeOS always seemed to me an expression of the main stem of Google culture. Android, if that is the distinction you were drawing, is from an alien planet.
That’s an interesting perspective. When I think of core Google culture, the first thing that comes to mind is the mission statement, “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”.
If search is the root, then the branches would be maps, street view, books, earth, scholar, patents, etc. Just cataloguing and indexing everything there is. Truly mind-blowing projects, each one of these. Hardware (and some of the other PAs) seem somewhat tangential to this core idea.
What comes to mind for you when you think of Google culture, and what parts of that do you see in ChromeOS?
I always viewed platforms hardware as the core organization. I really think dirt-cheap computers is their core product and all those things you mentioned are just side-effects of owning a huge number of servers. The Chromebook definitely resembles the internal platforms approach to removing as much as possible from the machine. Everyone else has followed but in 2010 the CR48 was quite a bare-bones machine.
On the software side, ChromeOS also reminds me of the Google's internal platforms software. Remove everything and start from scratch, build something that doesn't really resemble anyone else's Linux distro. Use all of the sandboxing and isolation features that other distros ignore, and invent a few new ones. Don't take the BIOS for granted. Maybe you don't need one.
Is the chromebook division run by an entire different company? They are great exactly where Google has otherwise failed.