Well, these are also short-term gains. When developers are your mainstay and the culture tanks everything else goes with it. Despite these cuts they say that Google's offering multi-million deals to hang on to talent that may go to a hotter startup for less and those are just the stars. Potential stars probably think of Google like working at a bank, stable but boring.
I wish they really did focus on search. Google's simplicity works great for simple informational queries. But, search quality on anything else is still laughable. Site-specific search sucks. Shopping search sucks. Why? No filters and no sorting of results.
The could also add more structure to the results. I feel that results like this are the future:
He's doing great. In 100 days he managed to show us a Google that resemble a lot more its early innovative roots.
I'm not sure how one follows the other. Anything launched in the past 100 days (such as Plus) would have had to have been in the works for months or years. This seems to be the folly of judging one man's impact on an organization of tens of thousands of people.
But shouldn't some credit be attributed to the top boss for getting the hurdles out of the way and letting people make decisions? Probably that is something he could have paved the way for to launch G+ in style.
Given the woods, Mr. Page has done an admirable job pruning the suckers and trimming deadwood. Let's see what he plants.