I used to work for the US side of a German multinational (one of the largest in the world) and discovered the same thing when it came to software.

The German side always had slick presentations (they always had good visual marketing) and impressive claims, but whenever I tried to work with their products, I always found the claims overstated and that they hadn't really executed deeply. This despite my German counterparts working hard (I visited HQ in Germany and when they work, they really work and clock the hours, no idle chitchat)... yet it doesn't translate to impact.

A lot of their products had impressive front-ends but half-baked back-ends (on the American side, it's the reverse -- our interfaces looked like crap, but our stuff actually worked and often delivered in less time).

A lot of their designs were also non-human friendly (if you've ever driven a German car, you'll realize that the car was built for engineers and not for end users -- weird little user-hostile features pop up everywhere). I don't understand why this is -- this is a nation that produced Dieter Rams. Tobi Lutke (CEO Shopify) likes to talk about how Germans grew up surrounded by good design, yet that design culture never permeated many German products. I own a Bosch in-unit washer/dryer and it's frustratingly unintuitive and has a "my (the engineer's) way or the highway" philosophy.

I went to a BMW talk once about the infotainment system (it was built on the latest Azure tech), but came away feeling that the work was not deep. It was skin deep.

I wonder what has happened to the German builder/tinkerer culture that made German manufacturing great. In the 1980s and 1990s, Germany was synonymous with excellence. But in the 2000s-present, not so much (except maybe in very narrow mittelstand verticals, e.g. Zeiss).