Given what I know about Google culture, which has also been brought up in other threads here, this isn't that surprising. I think because of the extent to which their promotion process relies on demonstrating technical achievement, it's hard for them to get enough people to work on things if they aren't technically challenging.
I could understand putting in less effort, or more effort, but failing the way they did was mind boggling and just seems like lack of a strategy on the management level.