Google was too innovative and successful to use external consultants and so the consultants joined the company as employees and did it from the inside!
Google today feels like Nokia of the mid-2000s. Victim of its own massive success, taken over by internal politics and divisions. Employs lots of smart people who figured out key ideas for next-gen tech early, but the organization is unable to take any of those innovations to market. And so it’s just stuck milking its cash cow.
Google’s AI strategy is as clear as Nokia’s smartphone software strategy was.
They took some of the best brains, spoiled them with high salaries and glory and took their best years to make them work on dumb problems and projects that were cancelled at various stages of their life.
Those best brains did produce lots of interesting things, back in the day (not recently). The Google search algorithm, the ads auctioning system, Gmail, Golang, certain parts of Google Cloud like BigQuery (create relational tables, just stuff data in there, just scales by itself without "provisioning", write SQL queries including joins e.g. over hundreds of billions of rows...)
