I hate to tell you, but the only reason Google “ate the world” during the times you describe (which I’m skeptical of, but that’s a separate discussion) was that they figured out they could sell ads against their search results. Almost everything else seemed exactly like what you’re describing: a bunch of ICs with no managers building cool stuff that didn’t affect the bottom line, had bad usability, didn’t have a clear use case, overlapped the work of other teams, or all of the above.

The Google of today is different: multiple billion dollar business units, all well-staffed with managers.