> Our infrastructure is somewhat ossified these days: the new and exotic are not well accepted

I think that's rather uncharitable. I work in T.I. and while I can't namedrop a number of internal projects I can assure you there's a lot of deep innovation happening in our corner. Are they poised to get Spanner-esque adoption across the whole company? Unlikely. But it's unfair to knock the infrastructure and assume we're way past some innovation renaissance.