It's a big company, I can imagine the browser guys wanting this but the ad guys saying they "can't" do this and there being a mini-war.
You get the sense that sort of thing happens all the time at microsoft for example, before Ballmer left it felt like the ASP.Net team were pulling in one direction, the Visual Studio team another and the IIS team had gone rabid and were just trying to bite everyone.
It happens when different products have different priorities.
It also happens when one department is perceived as an "expense" like IT or R&D, and starts pushing against "revenue-generating" departments like sales.
Of course, all components of a properly-functioning organization are revenue-generating. An idealized business in some respects would be people giving you money with no money being spent. Everyone knows that's not how the world works, but it's awfully hard to justify on a quarterly statement.
At Google, many departments aren't directly revenue-generating. Sure, Chrome and Android help people browse the Internet, where they view ads, but that's quite removed from actually selling the product, and those are very large projects. Search, maps, and gmail can show ads internally to generate revenue, but that's still a layer removed. Perhaps Google Apps and Drive are loss leaders, and maybe Fiber will make money eventually, but Glass? Calico? Driverless cars? Loon? Seriously, where does the money for these projects come from? I suppose you can answer "AdSense and AdWords", but why do those businesses give them money? And the harder question is how do they generate political and cultural capital to maintain these expenses?
At most of the companies I have been involved with, these projects would have been cut, outsourced, or consumed by the AdWords and AdSense teams. But there's little question that the world is better and the Internet is used more because of projects like Search, Gmail, Android, and Chrome.
How does Google generate this culture? How can other companies replicate this process?
Counting web ads served to users as revenue generated by the computer's operating system is ludicrous. Oracle is trying to misrepresent the amount of money made so they can sue for damages. The numbers are BS.
There are a lot of pieces to that puzzle. One of them is a stock program that basically guarantees the investors have a voice, but zero actual steering capacity for the company, coupled with a CEO who wants to take risks, coupled with a company track record of risks paying off in bizarrely outsized ways just often enough to keep investors hungry for the stock in spite of the fact that ownership of the stock grants them no control.
In short, the company's founders have the ability to steer where the company's money goes, nobody has the authority to tell them otherwise, and so far benevolent dictatorship is working. To give a concrete contrasting example, Apple ousted Steve Jobs when his leadership became fiscally risky; because of Alphabet's stock structure, there's no legal way for holders to directly oust Larry Page.
You get the sense that sort of thing happens all the time at microsoft for example, before Ballmer left it felt like the ASP.Net team were pulling in one direction, the Visual Studio team another and the IIS team had gone rabid and were just trying to bite everyone.
It happens when different products have different priorities.