At this point, it is just part of the corporate innovation cycle: first you make money by creating better products, once the tech matures and the gains in engineering are marginal, you move focus to sales and try to gain market. Then when the market is saturated, you move your focus to finance, aquisitions and cost-trimming.

From this pov, it looks like google got caught flat-footed (when it was moving from sales to finance) by a tech breakthrough and seems to be in “manage the shit out of this” mode, when now what they needed was to go back to an engineering focus, but by now it is too late, because the company already alienated the most dedicated engineers and can’t get them back while still in sales/finance focus.