Ah, that's why you have the problem now. You let the madmen take over the asylum! Sorry, guys, I know engineers love to believe that everything would be fine if engineers ran everything. It just ain't so.
I think it's fair to say that Google's leadership is also not up to the job. But even if Satya Nadella were in charge, he'd still have to deal with the "grad school playground" aspect, which has as many negatives as positives from the vulgar point of view of making money.
More generally, I want to argue that the common HN meme, "management and politics ruins everything from the point of view of us heroic engineers", is self-serving and naive. Management and politics are how companies run. If you don't want to do that job, fine; if you want to grumble about its pathologies, fine and you'll often be right; but don't kid yourself that it can be avoided.
There are different meanings one could use for this, though. Look at a graph of MSFT and you can pinpoint where Ballmer (not engineer) handed off to Nadella (engineer).
What exactly do you think went wrong at Google in the early years?