Earlier quoted context omitted.
They did plan ahead! The plan was to push some newfangled "world changing" product, get a promotion .. and move on in the company.
Yep. When I read somewhere here another article about thebpromotion processes at Google, the early Stadia launch started immediately making so much sense. It was a launch for internal reasons. > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21882791
They should stagger the perf cycle on a division/product basis so there isn't an incentive to ship to align with the promo cutoffs.