Oh, there definitely were obvious failures of execution. Not on the core streaming tech side, but on the business and product aspects. The product should have been quite compelling: a way of playing current gen console games with basically no up front hardware investment and no ongoing subscription. That's what the "free" version of Stadia was.

But then they muddied things up with Stadia Pro, making people think it was actually supposed to a "Netflix for games" subscription service, and crucially making Stadia Pro the only SKU for a very long time. So rather than the really appealing entry point to console gaming that people could have easily tried, they ended up targeting the exact people for whom Stadia was the worst fit (hardcore gamers with existing console owners and large game libraries).