The majority of Googles profit/revenue still comes from search/advertising. It has generated wads of cash for them, but if they just sat on the cash it would not make Wall Street happy so they've thrown a bunch of money at different efforts to make it look like they have more than just search and advertising to boost the stock price. Because of that there has been no incentive to see these other products to fruition, but at the same time they could afford to throw money at it as it helped to boost the stock price. Now however there is the new threat of regulation in both the US and Europe with the later also starting to impose fines. This makes me wonder if part of the motivation is to retrench with investment because of some potentially significant headwinds.

My guess is that what people have observed inside of the company is a manifestation of that.