Interesting point, particularly in light of their history of starting up products only to kill them off 2-5 years later. One could say they are data-driven to sell ads, but that's almost overly broad and makes it hard to explain niches like self-driving cars.
It seems to me that when it comes to growing and scaling their successful products, Google is data-driven. However when bringing new products to market Google basically has been driven by what leadership thinks is interesting/important, instead of analyzing what the market wants.
Sometimes they hit a big opportunity like Gmail and it grows like crazy, but a lot of the time there's actually no market for their product, or the technology is nowhere near ready to work at scale. This leads to a lot of canceled projects.
Interesting point, particularly in light of their history of starting up products only to kill them off 2-5 years later. One could say they are data-driven to sell ads, but that's almost overly broad and makes it hard to explain niches like self-driving cars.