Marissa had a lot of impact, but not as an executive. Contrary to popular belief, she never reported to the CEO. She was always 2 or more levels "down". She basically made the jump from non-senior-VP to CEO by changing jobs. She just didn't have that much experience at the CEO level, and that showed.
He had a bit of bad PR, but Tim Armstrong seems to have had some success as CEO of AOL, at least by the metric of investment return (I became an AOL shareholder and the stock did modestly well under his tenure).
I think if there's any criticism you can make, it's that Google's ad technology gushes revenue, and that may be taken for granted by executives until they don't have it at another job. Huge amounts of revenue solves a lot of problems.
Another example of this is Uber's Ryan Graves. He was Uber's original CEO, but was replaced in December 2010 by Travis Kalanick[0]. At that point, Uber's success was by no means ensured, but Graves stuck with it, and now he's a billionaire anyway[1].
0: https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/22/uber-ceo-super-pumped-abou...
1: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2015/03/02/uber-billio...
It wasn't nikesh, marissa, vic, larry or sergey that was important. It was the idea of google.
> - it comes from teams.
Even if you moved the entire team to softbank, it's not going to change much. Google was the right idea at the right time. Has nothing to do with "culture,people,etc". Lots of tech companies have the culture of google.
In other words, somebody has to be google, somebody has to be facebook, apple, microsoft, etc. We just think that some people have some magical secret or some magical talent. But it's just a simple matter of somebody having to win and everyone else having to lose.
> Success is more about being at the right place at the right time rather then being the right person.