A lot of preaching but bears little resemblance to what Google is actually doing in reality. IMHO those who actually understand what "simplicity" means in software are only those who have tried to do anything in highly-resource-constrained environments.
A taxonomy of what we mean when we talk about "resource-constrained" might be helpful for those seeking to gain this knowledge. Limited CPU, RAM, etc are the obvious contenders - but then there's also "resource-constrained" as in "I'm the solo dev of this project and have 5 hours in a good week to work on it", or "this runs in a weird place without Internet that I only get access to twice a year". I've been in all of these situations, sometimes multiple at the same time, and they've been great forcing functions to find new paths towards simplicity.
You also have to keep in mind the scope and timeline of where these principles apply. I'm sure someone would be able to apply them to their own work most of the time but if you look at a company as a whole, unless someone at the top is really pushing for global simplicity, things are pretty messy most of the time.
I'm just saying this because Google might be doing this in little islands, not as a company strategy. I don't really know and can only guess from the outside.
