One of the problems with companies that have cash cow revenue streams is that it sometimes doesn't matter what kinds of decisions the executives make, poor or good, the money will keep rolling in...until one day it doesn't and nobody has a clue how to actually manage the rapidly sinking ship.
I've been studying Atari for quite a while, there's so many interesting pieces to the company and their success and failure, and it's all been so well documented and autopsied that it makes for a marvelous case study that still has amazing applicability today.
I think you can look back and see some things that Google has done successfully. Youtube turns out to have been a good buy. Google successfully managed the transition to mobile, which many questioned whether Google would be able to do ("Mobile first"). Most recently, Google has made a huge bet that their future is intrinsically tied in with machine intelligence ("AI first"). We'll get to watch over the next 5-10 years how that plays out.
(It's probably already clear that there's a lot of power in an AI-first approach, but it's worth noting that this change didn't just happen with Sundar's blog post last month. A better way to look at it is to realize that if Google has been running their custom machine learning ASICs for over a year now, they must have started designing them well before that, which, to me, was amazingly early. Google acquired DeepMind in 2014.)
Not all those bets will, or have to, work, as long as some of them work out really well. I'm curious to see what happens with VR, for example. But I think AI is the most obvious central bet, in the same that that mobile was beforehand.
I'd bet that "AI first" will play out well for them, because AI is beneficial to both search and ads - while self-driving cars, fiber and balloons are not.
"Racing the Beam" is a more technical analysis of some of the early Atari platform development for the VCS/2600. This platform was Atari's cash cow and they failed to really pivot away from it. https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Beam-Computer-Platform-Studies...
I've been studying Atari for quite a while, there's so many interesting pieces to the company and their success and failure, and it's all been so well documented and autopsied that it makes for a marvelous case study that still has amazing applicability today.