I'm unsure how your comment about external matters relates to the article because none of these were discussed.
The criticisms were specifically internal: 1. no mission, 2. no urgency, 3. delusions of exceptionalism, and 4. mismanagement.
1. Never sure which product to work on. Jumping round starting and stopping products without a sense of strategy.
2. Country club mindset where everything moves slowly and people aren't driven.
3. "My way is already perfect, so there's nothing to change." It's typical introvert developer-is-also-the-PM behavior.
4. Managers making technical decisions.
These types of signals are typical of end-stage, innovation-dead corporations because I've seen many of them up close and personally. And, I've also have seen the energy of startups and companies that were still ascending.
People advocating for a breakup[1] are mostly trying to separate advertising sales from search to prevent what seems like a manifest conflict of interest. I think preventing monopoly rather than exceptionalism is the motivation.
Meh, it's just a default. Users can switch away. Without this revenue, Mozilla would die and there would be /less/ competition in the browser space. In the car of Apple, nearly all people would probably choose Google anyway. Apple is extracting rent because they dominate the market of high worth end users.
Google likes to present itself as hypercompetent and full of the best engineers that exist on the planet. In that sense, Google is the exact opposite of "down to earth". Being down to earth involves humility, with is not the image Google projects.
Many others do overestimate Google's abilities and expect Google to accomplish the impossible. But it seems to me that they're encouraged in this line of thinking by Google's own PR.
Downsize Alphabet/Goog by seventy percent to wring out the SF, Berkley niche community interests projected in culture war ads. Twitter did and the world's richest individual owns it. Do it.
"Delusions of exceptionalism". When a company becomes large and successful (I've heard similar stories about Microsoft), delusions of exceptionalism inevitably occur. There's a feeling of "manifest destiny". The employees are "the best and the brightest" working at one of the most successful companies. Egos are sure to become inflated.
Google has a cash cow which hides a lot of inefficiency. For sure, Google has a lot of talented people doing a lot of clever things. The majority of which is wasted. You could probably get rid of half of the employees and even achieve a better result.
What you want is something like another Bell Labs/Xerox Parc/Skunkworks. How many people? Less than 1000, I'd say, max. The rest can carry on moving dialog boxes from the top left of the screen to the top right, or whatever it is they do.
The whole best and brightest thing was 100% a phrase people tossed around there. The interviews are notoriously difficult. Because “we only hire the best”. But there’s a trap smart men fall into. Intelligence leads to success, success to arrogance, arrogance to error, error to failure.
I don’t think it’s the rank and file you need to get rid of.
* Google cannot provide you with an internet free of "bad things" (defined 8bn different ways by 8bn different people).
* Google are a decades old, mature, mega corp, they are pressed to be efficient and that means (increasingly) layoffs, not R&D.
* Google cannot provide gold standard service quality to accounts that are worth a few dollars or even 100s of dollars a year.
* Google cannot magically produce secure systems WITH backdoors only for law enforcement etc.
* Breaking up google will not solve any of these issues either
And yet people continue to insist...