Here's the thing -- well, two things, really: 1) The article mentions Obi Felton's Foundry team. This was explicitly added to solve one of the deficiencies at

Here's the thing -- well, two things, really: 1) The article mentions Obi Felton's Foundry team. This was explicitly added to solve one of the deficiencies at X: X is staffed by hardcore engineers & research scientists, not businesspeople. The Foundry team was created to add a commercialization path & process for X research, which never previously existed (except in special cases like self-driving car). That should, in theory, help bring more things to market. 2) Google is averse to investing in anything that isn't a moonshot (where I liberally define moonshot as "at least $1b or 1b users"). So many great ideas and products get shot down because they just aren't "Google scale" even though they'd be perfectly viable, and sometimes wildly profitable, businesses on their own. Because the bar for business viability is so high, lots of things aren't even tried, which is a shame.