In that time, I started out on an underappreciated starter project, did a hackathon for Hangout, filed some patents for that work, did 20% work for an yet to be announced project, and now building out a completely new yet to be announced product.
Google is a place that really allows you to find something that interests you and encourages you to do that. Internally, people are always looking for people to put in 20% work on their projects; so if you come across something that interests you, nobody is there to stop you.
Personally, if I was only to work on one project for my entire tenure, I'd be bored out of my mind and be looking elsewhere for opportunities. At Google, I can feed by project-ADD within.
One thing you learn at Google is that it really humbles you. You really are working with really intelligent people and you need to have some faith in your fellow coworker. Everyone has something to contribute and you can learn even more than you can teach/preach. Much of the issues with this former Googler is that he may have had some good/interesting ideas but he failed at garnering support. It doesn't help when he publicly on a global mailing list dismissed coworkers that have a significant amount of experience and real world accomplishments in the field that he was advocating.
I had widespread engineering support, actually. The problem was that (a) the people managing that product didn't understand the importance of quality in content, and (b) they were under obscene deadlines (which almost certainly wasn;'t their fault).
What really kicked me in the shins was when an executive, pissed off that people on his team agreed with what I was saying being the right way to go, threatened to damage my Perf ratings. My manager promised to protect me (he promised to "peg" me to 3.3-3.4, which is decent) and didn't deliver. After that, I started looking for transfer opportunities, because I'd caught my manager in a few lies but that was a big one, and I just couldn't trust my manager after that.
It turned out to be easier to get a job outside of the company, so I did.
From what I saw on the engineering-wide mailing list, where you told people who had many more years of engineering experience than you that they were full of sh*t, I'm sorry to say, no sir, you didn't have widespread engineering support.
Eng-misc went to hell about a month after that. By that point, it was obvious that RGI was going to fail due to executive pressure and that higher-ups were cracking down on internal dissent, so only the loyalists were even speaking up.