[UncleMeat]

With a 100,000 person company, the CEO cannot direct all products.

Startups can launch a product off 5 engineers. Let's say, hypothetically, Google is way less efficient and can launch a product off 50 engineers. You are looking at thousands of products. If the CEO spent literally every working hour just reviewing and approving products they get roughly an hour per product per year.

This means that these decisions must be delegated and therefore there will be decisions that seem boneheaded in retrospect. Its just a fact of being a massive company.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

The problem seems more cultural than you're giving it credit to be - several ex-Googlers have stated or written articles pointing out that the way Google handles promotions heavily incentivizes people to launch new products over working to improve existing ones.

[UncleMeat]

I'm a Googler and have been on promo committees. I've seen this material. I don't think it is entirely without merit, but I feel that it is fairly overblown. My org, for example, is much more focused on debt reduction and efficiency rather than launching products and we have historically had a higher promo rate than the norm.

[plorkyeran]

Apple has more employees than Google and has very top-down direction of products. You're starting from the assumption that prioritizing launching as many products as possible is obviously the correct goal, but the whole criticism is that Google values product quantity over product quality too much.