>>What engineering brilliance? I think most people's point is some where in the mid-2000's they quite literally were the ahead of the crowd by a huge margin wh

>>What engineering brilliance? I think most people's point is some where in the mid-2000's they quite literally were the ahead of the crowd by a huge margin when it came to in house engineering. Google in many ways was the first mega web scale company. The scale of their servers, data centers, in-house research, things like MapReduce, BigTable etc etc the list is endless. Google indeed was a hub for very smart people to work pre-2010's. Not sure what changed. I also hear their engineering driven culture has faded heavily if not totally dead. 20% time projects are no longer there, and even if they exist by a miracle they are largely hated by the internal cartels and power structures. Arguably the biggest slip in an engineering driven culture happens when your big products come through acquisitions not in-house work. That's the first indication that bureaucracy has taken over, and no real person worth their salt is running their show. The reason why start ups can disrupt the market and not big companies, is because 1 - 2 people with a good team are what do the disruption. Its a mistake to assume that companies or your average middle manager Joe can do much in that area.