It's extremely inconsistent internally as well.
Look up the slime mold analogy for Google.
Google did a very good job on things that required longer research times and compute scale, note that Transformers, BERT & Scaling Laws came out of Google (though the latter were also worked on at OpenAI).
Conversely, Google is horrible at product, and without OpenAI, it probably would have taken many years longer to take off. I know this because Google had demos of this internally, but absolutely no stomach to release it, and they didn't believe in the API use case at all.
Which is to say, I think if Google was smaller, we probably would have gotten more SaaS, not more breakthrough research.
It's also worth noting, Gemini 3.5 Pro never came out.
Having worked there (but only in a small part of it that eventually got absorbed into Gemini), it's some combination of:
* The eye of Sauron (management) can make specific spots (e.g. Gemini) push harder (and attract the motivated people at the company and be selective)
* They hire a lot better than average (Generally from the top 10%, hotter places in Google are more selective)
* They have a promo process that gives career motivated people a way to prove themselves (not always aligned with things being on the right track ofc, and not always non-political, but they definitely do something)
* Redundancy in teams causes them to compete (not necessarily productively)
Of course, there are other downsides not listed here (insane bureaucracy for launches, GDPR/BCID compliance, etc, etc), but a lot of what makes Google possible is the insane amounts of cash Search throws off.
Perhaps one of their more successful chat clients, but that's all I can think of
The really annoying ones are the ones they buy, and then shutter because they can't make enough money on them fast enough.
What if the answer is "they don't"?