That's the value of the stock, which is distinct from the quality of the product. You can make a lot of money selling bad products for a high price. (At least if they are bad for users but good for businesses)
... then they're wildly successful. It seems the key takeaway here is "You can write just-good-enough software, sell it well to people for whom it solves real problems they have, and succeed."
Probably something all of us in the venture, startup, service-sector-tech space could stand to learn.
In what sense is it garbage, and relative to what? And if it's garbage, why haven't people switched yet? I hear good things about Proton Mail; it has about 100 million users. Why aren't people leaving Gmail in droves to switch to it?
Because it works extremely reliably for a vast swathe of users.
(When I was younger, I wondered the same thing. An older relative who used to own a grocery store shared his vantage point with me. Before Windows came along, things were fragmented and complex, and that made it hard for him to do his job: manage grocery inventory, sell to customers, and track the money. IBM, Microsoft, and their ilk brought to the space something that was hard to build before: integrated solutions where there was one mostly-right answer for most problems and, most importantly, you didn't have to hunt it down because it was right in front of you. This is huge for people who want their nine-to-five to be something other than "the computer itself."
Because we hackers love having our nine-to-five be "the computer itself," I think we sometimes lose sight of how few decisions people outside our ecosystem want to be making. They just want it to work. They want to pay someone to make it work. And there's a lot of money to be made in being the companies that do that.)
Seems like a pretty nice gig, being a corporate flop.