The privacy argument doesn’t make sense to me. The addresses are already in Google Calendar. They don’t need to be saved into a different service to be viewed anonymously in Google Maps. You can already do it in Google Calendar for one event/address at a time.
Yes there are business/internal-politics reasons why some obvious features or experimentation doesn’t happen, but those aren’t necessarily good reasons beyond short term benefit to specific individuals at a company.
But I do think some of it can generally be blamed on large companies losing their ability to be nimble due to the inherent friction of the politics and logistics that build up as an organization grows.
FWIW, I worked on the integration with calendar and maps - the GP comment is exactly right, it was due to privacy concerns. The terms of service for Workspace say that user data can never be used for anything not related to Workspace, so moving any user data from Workspace to another service has to be done very carefully.
In the example of this integration, allowing it to open in the sidebar was okay because it was a user action, and there is some data anonymization that happens (I don't recall the details, this was a few years ago).
But we couldn't share a list of your appointments with maps ahead of time to allow them to generate the view you describe, because there wasn't a way that guaranteed that the data wouldn't be associated back with the original user.
Yes there are business/internal-politics reasons why some obvious features or experimentation doesn’t happen, but those aren’t necessarily good reasons beyond short term benefit to specific individuals at a company.
But I do think some of it can generally be blamed on large companies losing their ability to be nimble due to the inherent friction of the politics and logistics that build up as an organization grows.