IIUC Pike spent most of his career in research right ?
I think Pike and the other designers skew more towards corporate research (Bell Labs). And surely the development of GO as well as other Google research projects are intended to win in the market place.
From https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article > The Go programming language was conceived in late 2007 as an answer to some of the problems we were seeing developing software infrastructure at Google