[btilly]

There is something key that you are missing here. Being unfocused is a core corporate value for Google. That's why they deliberately give every engineer 20% of their time to do pretty much whatever they want to do. Many popular products, such as gmail, started this way. Crazy as it sounds, so far this has been working out quite well for them.

The side effect is that you see apparently crazy things like some engineer deciding that he wants to install solar panels in the parking lot, which after one thing lead to another lead the company as a whole deciding to be carbon neutral. However the culture sees this as a benefit. After all that was good for morale, good for the corporate image, and the resulting focus on efficiency has been saving money. What's not to like?