I can't say whether you failed the interview because of that but Google is a company that believes that their superior technology validates itself.

Sometimes it's the pressure "if you can't sell them in millions, we don't want to do it at Google". This means Google is a great company to make acquisitions that they can scale e.g docs, maps, YouTube, Android.

Google has so much money than they know what to do with it. They can't experiment like a startup because failed products hurt their brand.

Their best bet is to invest in startups that use their stack and if successful, acquire and scale the shit out of them.