After Larry Page replaced Eric Schmidt, Google turned into company run by salesmen(even though Page had a really groundbreaking idea with his PageRank algorithm). It is not what it used to be in the past.
It no longer innovates. Google's strategy is now more like the one that Microsoft used - copy successful products of other companies and use your money and resources as a leverage. In the mean time, to kill the competition, perform smear campaigns against them or use the vast cash reserves to let them die the financial death(cutting their margins as in the case of Dropbox).
I mean look at Google's search results, they display google + anywhere it is possible. The same can be said about youtube, google books. Soon they will cut off tremendous amount of profit from other websites by introducing the Google shopping upgrade ( paid placement! something they despised in the past ).
They always defend themselves by saying: "Other search engines are just one click away. People are free to choose others, but since they stay, it must mean we do something good."
Well it is mainly people's habits. For majority of Internet users, 'google' means 'search'. What is interesting is that even if other search engines have better quality of results, those people will not change their search provider. People prefer Bing results to Google's results when they are served in Google's template. That proves something interesting.
I understand - shareholders want growth - but for fucks sake, stop turning that company into the Big Brother.