I think if you look at it from a competitive aspect it makes more sense. During Schmidts reign, competition was mostly irrelevant for google. They came on the scene and just won everything. Search, huge market share from nothing very quickly, introduced gmail and people quickly abandoned yahoo and hotmail. They bought YouTube and instantly owned the video market. They haven't really been a competitive company until the last few years.

Now Bing is making inroads into Google's search market, and Facebook is in some ways re-wiring the way we manage information (Googles goal). Though they may be leading in numbers with Android now, they have some very serious competition.