They probably are. There's a ton of interesting research going on at Google that is not being capitalized on economically. They just need a few ambitious visitors or ex-employees to "liberate" it, the way Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did to Xerox. In some cases (eg. TensorFlow, Chromium, protobufs, or LevelDB) it's already been open-sourced.

Note that neither AT&T nor Xerox were the prime beneficiaries of technologies developed at Bell Labs or PARC, respectively.