I don't think it is speculation, Google has always considered the infrastructure things they did as a competitive advantage, super top secret stuff that even other employees don't know about kind of silos.

And to your second point, it is interesting that OCP (some of it perhaps influenced by people who had worked at Google and then later worked at Facebook) appears to have minimized some of the advantages Google had, and now they find themselves possibly getting behind (one of the nice things, and bad things, about open projects like this are that you get a lot more resources applied to making things better than one company can muster).

For similar reasons I wonder if ARM will displace x86 if only because there are probably 15 to 20 independent teams of smart people with ARM architecture licenses making better ARM processors, and perhaps 4 such teams at Intel making improvements in the x86 architecture. At some point it seems "open" seems to eventually overwhelms "walled garden." Although I'm totally open to counter examples where that hasn't been the case.