Google ran an experiment: "We are surrounded by stodgy, calcified software firms. Can we build a company that isn't like that and is also successful?"
For a long time, they succeeded. But I think that experiment has run to a conclusion and they've discovered for themselves why their competition became stodgy and calcified (it wasn't because that's what they wanted to be; it's because the larger you get, the more diverse work you're doing, the more you're rewarded for being reliable and efficient, not scrappy and disruptive).
I'm not sure I'd give them that much credit in executing on any strategy.
Google sat on perhaps the biggest moat any recent company has known. They had cash to burn for decades and to their credit put a lot of that towards employee happiness.
But I'm not sure they ever really got anything off the ground for the "post" search era.
It's hard to be the scrappy and disruptive company when you've established the reputation that all of your new products efforts are a probably just months away from being showcased on https://killedbygoogle.com.
Google ran an experiment: "We are surrounded by stodgy, calcified software firms. Can we build a company that isn't like that and is also successful?"
For a long time, they succeeded. But I think that experiment has run to a conclusion and they've discovered for themselves why their competition became stodgy and calcified (it wasn't because that's what they wanted to be; it's because the larger you get, the more diverse work you're doing, the more you're rewarded for being reliable and efficient, not scrappy and disruptive).