Google brings to mind the ship of Theseus - many of the core decision makers have changed over the years, to the point where it's arguably a different company.

The biggest change was 2015 (two years after your article): the founders and Eric Schmidt stepped back and a couple of other folks retired, leading to a new CEO, CFO and CBO. Their opinions on how to best run the company were quite different to their predecessors.

I think another major change is the attention Google started to get from government and regulators.