Ah, if that's your point then I disagree. There is no "DNA". A big tech company can and should try to do many things in many markets, look at Microsoft. When they started with Basic interpreters, or even when they launched Windows, would you have said that Xbox is in their "DNA"?

Perhaps DNA is too strong a word, because it would seem to imply that change is impossible. It's more that Google executed the changes badly, after the "PM shift" as we're calling it happened, they continued to fail to see growth in these new markets, and failed to address exactly why that was. Instead they simply got very good at unlaunching their failed products.

All the while, the shift in the company began to dull the sharp edge that was their core competency: engineering driven products.

Yeah, that sounds fair to me. The PM shift didn't really fix the problems it was supposed to fix, and introduced new ones.