One could argue (and I do) that it is the life they chose, they want their cake and to eat it too. But absolute control over the user experience is pretty much incompatible with 'open'[1]. As someone who was privileged to here some of the debate about this pre-1.0 launch I can tell you that the things that have come to pass are not 'surprises.'
An alternative way to deal with this is to execute well and have you're stuff be the 'best' by virtue of the fact that you have a bunch of great focussed folks working on it and delivering new updates, but that is a hard strategy to execute successfully. There are a lot of folks 'outside' vs 'inside' when you are truly open.
In one such internal discussion, when the question of lots of people outside of Google trying lots of different UI's and form factors, it was noted (with a well known cliche) 'that is a good problem to have.' I guess not so much :-)
[1] Submitted as exemplar the KDE vs Gnome "discussion."
An alternative way to deal with this is to execute well and have you're stuff be the 'best' by virtue of the fact that you have a bunch of great focussed folks working on it and delivering new updates, but that is a hard strategy to execute successfully. There are a lot of folks 'outside' vs 'inside' when you are truly open.
In one such internal discussion, when the question of lots of people outside of Google trying lots of different UI's and form factors, it was noted (with a well known cliche) 'that is a good problem to have.' I guess not so much :-)
[1] Submitted as exemplar the KDE vs Gnome "discussion."