Continuous deployment and stuff - pay attention!

Google's software and especially processes are not under that much scrutiny from the community and it obviously takes its tall. As soon as your code has stepped out of the cradle it is not about how cool and clever it is but rather reliability and what follows. In the long run the process is what counts, and there old dogs like Microsoft beat Google, even if the latter gets away easy where the former is been chewed.
Numerous successes of Google are widely publicized and known. But dude, open seven Chromes, close them all and take a look at your RAM. Or try to engage Google's Account Manager to buy (as in "pay money"!) one of their services. Or build a product which uses one of their Lab API's and then be informed they played with it enough, got tired and shut it down. And they killed Kenny!
Yet another Gmail glitch can speak to the lack of a proper processes in place. The problem is around for almost a week and it is either the product is not that ubiquitous or Google does simply has no capacity to turn around that fast. With the thousands of servers the glitch made its way with all cool tools of the day - Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration and what-not - sloppy-executed, negligently-tested, poorly-managed.
Hordes of coolest kids can ride their colorful campus on Segways and it does not matter without a good old tiresome pernickety testers and malevolently censorious product managers.