Every vendor is moving to SDN and hardware is getting more and more generalized with more functions crammed into smaller die space. Google is just using its mas

Every vendor is moving to SDN and hardware is getting more and more generalized with more functions crammed into smaller die space. Google is just using its massive cash reserves and R&D capability to beat the vendors to the punch. They probably expect network vendors to go this way, and want to eventually sell these new routers as a service to customers the way they did with their search boxes. There's also the little problem of routers facing an ever-bigger internet and not getting any more efficient, so planning for the future means having better scaling routers.