But then Google gives you a car for free, then tells you it won't work in six months as they're canceling the service. Then they do it again, and again, and then no one wants a Google Car because it would just get canceled. The idea may have served them, the execution has not. This idea also translates into, "I know better than you what you want", which leads to not listening, not hearing, and ignoring your customer's needs, which is 199% Google.
Google is an ad company whose core competency is getting lots people to click on links and buy things in exchange for money. They aren't exactly revolutionizing the world for good. Most of their innovative ideas get a splashy launch, middling support for a while, and then fizzle and/or get killed.
The idea that there are millions of people who want to be told that motherboard is a dirty word every time they write it, but won't realize that desire until Google foists it on them, just strikes me as absurd.
Has it actually served them well? How many of Google’s controversial launches have turned out well? The YouTube acquisition was risky but that was more on the commercial side than on the product side.
I feel like I can just gesture to the stock price and say "scoreboard," but that seems an unfair dismissal of the question.
To expound on the topic a bit: I think when they were a smaller company it served them well consistently. Photos and Drive have become an enterprise cornerstone that supports their "light cloud" business space (quite a few people pay for that extra storage). Ads doesn't get talked about much, but the internal culture is very quick-innovate. Chrome went from being a wild idea to dominating the browser-share (and therefore giving Google a foot in the door on everyone's desktop computer), and then they parlayed that into a whole operating system play. Maps basically displaced most of the other players in that space and now competes with only a couple other contenders.
I don't know if it will continue to do so now that they're an 800-lb gorilla in the room. They've certainly become more structurally conservative in the decade-plus since their founding. And I think their push into Cloud is putting pressure on them to act a lot more starched-collar; Enterprise is a different customer than they're used to (or comfortable with) dealing with.
... and the willingness to take risks has historically served them pretty well.