I mean... they had it. For ten or fifteen years. In CS, at least. That mostly ended when they became a VC financing & monetization endpoint rather than a nov

I mean... they had it. For ten or fifteen years. In CS, at least. That mostly ended when they became a VC financing & monetization endpoint rather than a novel research platform, and renamed themselves 'Alphabet', cut R&D spending to about 1/12th of revenue, hired a bunch of middle managers and marketing execs, and killed 20% time, because the idea of a thousand engineers making white-paper reports about how they chose to spend their time to one CTO was no longer a favored organizational strategy for executing further growth by shareholders. They still do a great deal of research, but it's less blue-sky and more focused. Google's got 182,000 employees now, with official R&D spending at about four times the National Science Foundation, but still in the 10-15% of revenue band. This is more a condemnation of the NSF and Congress than praise of Google.