Creating a product that operates at a loss (by funding it with ad money from search), effectively evaporating small players in that niche, only to kill the product in several years, leaving a smoldering hole where an ecosystem used to be?

Or, in cases like Picasa buying a product, only to shut it down and force existing users onto a new platform (Photos in that case) with no feature parity.

If that's innovation, it's a rather sad kind. Google could do with less of that.

And as a xoogler: Google is long past trying crazy things. New things — sure, crazy — nope. Crazy won't fly in a project proposal.

FWIW most of the things mentioned in the parent comment (Waymo, Wing, etc) are not Google.

Yes, they're owned by the same holding group. But if you work at Google, you don't have access to projects, employees, and spaces.