It might be an old critic, but Google truly makes an effort to keep it current. They're simply an unreliable company.
I don't think it's intentional, but it's a side-effect of Google's bonus structure[1]. There's more money to be made (by employees) if their team successfully launches a new product. Maintaining existing products isn't as profitable, in fact, launching and deprecating popular products as frequently as possible is the optimal scenario for maximizing bonuses.
1. From the information I've encountered. I'm not a Googler.
Google is an R&D company really, not a consumer one.
Off the top of my head, I've observed:
- Resume Driven Development: wherein enterprise contractors and developers inject as many fad frameworks, architectures, and uncalled for features unnecessarily.
- Vendor Driven Development: wherein the application architecture is tie to a cloud solutions billing model as much as possible.
- Search Engine Driven Development: wherein the code is just a bunch of copy/pasted code that isn't really understood, and doesn't really work together coherently.
- Ignorance Driven Development: wherein a perfectly serviceable solution which is better in every way was not used, simply because the developer saw a problem and immediately went to code, without looking at how everyone else in the world solves the problem.
- Delusion Driven Development: wherein a completely useless application is beautifully crafted based on the obvious delusions of a manager or founder, which have successfully spread to the development team without any critical push-back or data to back the deluded assertions of the authority that has deemed the software necessary.