It is said that the laser printer in itself paid off multiple times for PARC (I think I read it said by Alan Kay)
But of course they could have own the personal computer space and the local network space too.
Companies as profitable as Google probably ought to be thinking of other companies/society rather than themselves. The idea that companies should optimise purely for profit is the worst part of capitalism.
Those were basic research, not 'we have a bunch of cool tech, let's glue it all together and go do crazy stuff'. If Google would pump money into materials science that would be Bell Labs, if they worked on next level interaction models that should count too, in that sense I think their general AI/ML work; speech recognition; synthesis and image classification work is more in line with what Bell & Xerox were all about than Makani, which is most re-using existing technology in ways that do not make much sense.