it in't about taking eyes off the ball, it is about playing very different ball - they de-facto became commercial entity with short term plans/goals/targets/metrics and all the management games creeping in. Beating Google, such a large company who has been successfully playing that game for quarter of century is very hard, if not impossible until Google would make serious error itself.

And pure tech-wise - they seem to have went all-in on corp management understandable way of doing things - hardware(money) scaling which, while unavoidable in this game, must be accompanied by theoretic-algorithmic improvements as pure hardware scale game is again where Google is hardly beatable.