This was a case where a very large number of Googlers tried to advise leadership on some of its more boneheaded decisions and had to work overtime to deal with the problems and fallout.
For many, Google search reduced to a search engine for Wikipedia and StackOverflow and a couple of other big sites. This poses a long-term threat for search.
The funny thing is that while it's obviously synergetic, up to 2012 it was a Urs' toy project on the back-burner. It was mostly run from SEA/KIR with MTV leadership largely oblivious. There were gems like this, for example: once they forgot to cover cloud organization in the company OKR meetings broadcasted to all employees :) Only when they realized that external clouds grow so fast that Big G can loose it's preferential access to volume discounts GCP suddenly became the priority (to detriment of TI, which now largely is after-thought).
I'm convinced that Google going to cloud too late is going to be seen in history books in the same light as Microsoft/IE fiasco.
Please don't do this. It's alienating for people not in your gang.
Everybody thought social growth was critical (5 years ago, everybody thought Facebook would eat Google due to growth in mobile ads), but it turned out that social growth was not necessary, instead maximizing watch time on youtube and maximizing app installs in Play both turned out to be far more important. Google isn't worried about Facebook like they used to be- they're worried about Amazon and Apple.
