Google's Promotion System Drives AI Product Fragmentation, Developers Say

According to developer Gergely Orosz, Google's internal promotion mechanism rewards employees only for building new products while providing no incentive for maintaining existing systems or helping users migrate, creating pervasive fragmentation across the company's AI ecosystem.

Developer Nathan Clark outlined the scale of the issue: AI models are split into Pro, Ultra, and Flash versions; Gemini and AI Studio exist in parallel; and development tools remain fragmented, with platforms like Spark, Jules, multiple Antigravity IDE versions, and deprecated Gemini CLI coexisting. Video generation tools Flow and Veo lack clear differentiation, while image tool Nano banana was absorbed into Gemini, and search functions were split across separate AI mode and NotebookLM.