they missed cloud not because they were too busy. They thought of their internal cloud infrastructure as a competitive advantage to be kept to themselves. Very similar to the Intel's thinking of their own fabs which has brought Intel to the current failure.
Wrt. moonshots - one need to have huge political capital inside the company to carry the high risk of large investment. I.e. one has to be Jobs or Musk. Even Yang failed. How Nadella succeeded it is kind of a miracle. It looks like there are no people of that caliber at Google these days, and without it you have a CFO touting "investing for long term" which in CFO mind obviously means investment like buying real estate and not a technology moonshot.
Wrt. moonshots - one need to have huge political capital inside the company to carry the high risk of large investment. I.e. one has to be Jobs or Musk. Even Yang failed. How Nadella succeeded it is kind of a miracle. It looks like there are no people of that caliber at Google these days, and without it you have a CFO touting "investing for long term" which in CFO mind obviously means investment like buying real estate and not a technology moonshot.