I doubt the stagnation is the fault of poor hiring practices.
More likely has to do with monopolization and business models that favor advertising over users.
More likely has to do with monopolization and business models that favor advertising over users.
This is why the web is stagnating with near Chrome monopoly, just like during (shudder) the IE years.
Same for Google itself. Bing/DDG are only half-assed competitors. Google seems to be making search worse for all kinds of bad reasons, just because they can.
I'd guess most people who use an alternative to gmail specifically don't want to use Google, not because something else is better.