I don’t think it’s a strategic decision to avoid non-scalable products, I just think they’re fundamentally incapable of doing so because they’re not a customer-focused company. After all, it’s not like they didn’t launch their own games studio (quite possibly the least scalable exercise possible). They did, and then they just panicked and shut it down because they don’t know how to run something that doesn’t run itself.
Google still has a licence to print money but it is incredibly undiverse (unlike, say, Apple). The wheels could fall off very quickly if/when the world moves away from web search.
I'm not sure how Google would be able to do audits on large corps that may be accidentally using their software in an unlicensed way.
Because that's Oracles business model, sue your customers.
Google wants to make products that 1) scale without humans and 2) make a lot of money. That’s why things like search, email and to some degree video have worked out so well for them. Most products however, don’t seem to fit in that category, or at least not as well as google would want. I think google would would have to fundamentally change as an organization to become a successful content producer of any kind.