It's also similar to how Berkshire Hathaway is run; and how Christensen advocates nurturing disruptive businesses - smaller units can get excited about smaller

It's also similar to how Berkshire Hathaway is run; and how Christensen advocates nurturing disruptive businesses - smaller units can get excited about smaller sales that are a rounding error to Big Google (new markets start small); independent units are free to customize their business model and how they do things to what fits the opportunity (instead of fitting in with the parent's model and processes - which has compelling economies, but only early). e.g. it seems highly unlikely that advertising is the ideal revenue model for every business Google is in. The appropriate fit might be sales, renting, monthly charge, pay-per-use, royalty, per-developer, per-other-metric. It's not necessarily about extracting more money from customers, but revenue that makes sense for customers - that they prefer, that makes sense in the competitive set, that motivates the business to improve along the right dimensions.