There's a lot of survivorship bias. For any given process or practice, it can be hard to tell whether Google is successful because of it or despite it. A profitable or well-funded company in an uncompetitive market can afford to waste staggering amounts of time and money indulging the whims of senior managers, or even just weird internal cultures.
> A profitable or well-funded company in an uncompetitive market can afford to waste staggering amounts of time and money indulging the whims of senior managers
For a while, even in a competitive market, they can waste money. I'm reminded of a friend who worked for a large national book seller in the late 90s. He was placed on a project to investigate the company branding (and possibly producing) their own wine, for sale in stores. In-store cafes were such a hit, upscale wine sales (and profits) would be huge right? This was green-lit from some sr management who... coincidentally, was a wine buff, and they put a team together to go research the wine industry (which meant... travel to wineries for research, etc). This project never got off the ground, but the team learned a lot about wine and retailing wine for about a year, then was disbanded. The company started losing a lot of ground within a few years, and was defunct shortly after.
Rather than pursuing better ways of accommodating the coming internet wave... they squandered whatever chance they may have had on ... lunacy. Another couple of contacts I had there were showing me their own skunkworks "personalized reading lists" (think barebones 'goodreads' system in 2000). Projects like that were frowned on and not supported, in favor of "wine exploration".
