> Mandating every manager do a meaningless, symbolic one hour stint in customer support isn’t going …

It’s an incredibly condescending exercise, both to the managers (lol at a reduction of meeting time, is the assumption that managers go to meetings for fun?), and to the people who actually run support (who get to use already stretched resources to herd untrained, resentful managers). Google’s products aren’t bad because the VP’s have lost the meaning of holding your customer dear. Maybe their senior managers are stuffed with former startup founders, all visionaries in their own minds, who collect big windfalls to join, play at empire building for a few years, then quit in a huff and blog about how it’s everyone else’s fault.

I have limited knowledge about Google, but this sounds overly simplistic for at least GCP. Large contracts are locked behind FedRAMP compliance, DoD ILx, and so on, and I happen to know that all large cloud providers listen very closely to customers in this space. Your harsh criticism is valid under the assumption that GCP is an unsuccessful consumer product. I think it is only partially so and features are mostly driven by larger b2b and governments, where it is successful (in the sense that it delivers most features customers care about).