I don't work at Google, but do at a large tech firm. Backward compatibility is sacrosanct, breaking older clients, means getting approvals many levels up in the chain, writing decision docs and showing data about what % of customers will be affected. We don't even build consumer products.
"Customer outrage is temporary." -> Till it's not. If I could migrate my gmail (not even sure how many services I'd need to update) and use something else for Maps, I'd be off of all Google services.
Backwards compatibility would be even more important in that case. I've worked in product teams and we did all sorts of experiments to understand customer usecases before making a decision like this.
"Customer outrage is temporary." -> Till it's not. If I could migrate my gmail (not even sure how many services I'd need to update) and use something else for Maps, I'd be off of all Google services.