You're conflating two kinds of people: one type is very talented and perhaps overpaid, the other has connections and has never done a shred of actual productive work in their life.
What were they? Aren't most core Google products on rails, even getting slightly worse over time? And the non-core products just get buried in the desert.
Discussion requires modica of effort on both sides. Don't ask an easily googleable (hah) question on a discussion forum, they're not question and answer sites.
Whether or not I looked up the specific products, my general question remains, as I asked and prompted for more than just the names of the products. As far as I can tell, the Wikipedia article doesn't identify any particulars as to his management other than divisions he worked in.
See, now we're just discussing a link to "go look this up elsewhere" rather than actually addressing my questions. You could answer most questions on the Internet by "go look this up in <x>".