If they have a culture of "only catering to the big corporate players" like a lot people have been saying, it'd be hard to change momentum. They probably also had to do a lot of internal discussions about how they would address this, and what changes they wanted to make. They also had to be careful about how they responded, for fear of making things perceptibly worse.
I have no insight into their internals, but, IME, getting that many people, especially upper-management to adjust focus is a long, slow process. I'd guess it just took a lot of time to get coordinated.
I think I may have mis-stated my point. I'll caveat my response this with: This is what I've heard, I don't know if it's true.
They have an internal culture of "lets develop features for the companies that pay us, rather than the free-users". This got a lot of attention, because they started to realize that they can't keep heading in that direction and expect things to keep working.
I have no insight into their internals, but, IME, getting that many people, especially upper-management to adjust focus is a long, slow process. I'd guess it just took a lot of time to get coordinated.