My opinion is that you're reading way too much into this. Talent is obviously first. Without that you have no products worth speaking of.

Hasn't that always been the case with Google? Outside of a few that are mostly good and have stuck around, I've always seen Google has having great tech but being quite bad and making products out of it.

I was about to invest in Google, but your compelling observation has swayed me. Now it's obvious to me they are a dying company.

It just tells you about their intended audience: Investors rather than consumers.

Nowadays, every company—even huge ones—prefers to be seen as a "growth opportunity", so they are trying to play up their ability to create new products which will somehow be so incredible that the line keeps moving up forever.

That said, there is definitely a correlation between companies chasing new products and leaving old ones to become crap.

I'd bet my mortgage that if the first sentence was "We've got amazing products, amazing talent, and world-class compute", you'd be in the comments complaining that they didn't put talent first.

Google's revenue is 10x up in the last 10 years.

A company is made up of people, and makes products. Products can come and go for many reasons (or any reason) but the company will always have people.

So then it is similarly telling that compute is second on the list? They have more talent than compute? Layoffs incoming?

If these products are the place that talent has brought us, of what use was the talent?

This is also how Y Combinator operates.

Founders are first. Ideas are second.