The moment I saw the headline I was itching to express this exact sentiment.
Google seems unable to plan long-term - they had some of the most interesting VR and AR tech early-on but completely squandered the early lead by lacking any institutional commitment to the field.
Google was among the first to put specialized sensors on devices to gain a structural understanding of your surrounding physical environment. They canned it.
Google was among the first to ship accessible, affordable VR devices via Daydream. They canned that, too.
Google's SLAM implementation was best-in-class for a while, and has basically failed to turn that into anything while FB caught up.
The company as a whole seems to have no concept of long-term strategy. Every endeavor is dipped into with the most tepid of toes, and abandoned at the first sign of difficulty (see: Stadia, Allo, oh boy I can continue). A ton of fantastic research and work goes into products that the company should continue investing losses in for long-term strategic advantage, but the company ends up pursuing the worst of both worlds: paying for the R&D and then changing strategies on a whim.
I know the messaging thing is a dead horse but it deserves to be beaten some more: Google should be fielding an iMessage competitor by now, if only to complete the platform narrative, even if it will always lose to WhatsApp. But instead it has no iMessage competitor and has rebooted its messaging strategy 10x for no discernible results. The minimum of what they needed to do was just to field a competent, stable messaging app that serves as a usable baseline for Android users... and they failed even that.
And having been inside the sausage factory myself there's one huge lever that can be pulled here: Google upper management needs to get way more obsessive about products and long-term roadmaps.
The reason why these projects die so easily is because they tend to be owned by mid-level managers and junior execs, a tier of the company where there is intense turnover. Projects die when their patrons leave the company, get promoted, move orgs, or just generally lose interest. There is frequently no champion for the project besides whichever manager/junior exec owns it. If the company hopes to invest in a field long enough for it to actually bear fruit, the commitments need to come directly from the top.
A lot of this is the hangover of Google+, whose shadow every project (even non-social media ones) lives under. The company seems desperately afraid of making multi-year commitments to things unless they are bearing immediate fruit, out of fear that they'll pull another G+, where failing ideas continued to get disproportionate investment via dictat. I don't know what the right solution to that is, but it certainly isn't what they're doing right now.