Google didn't miss on MapReduce; it missed on Cloud. Amazon was light years behind in datacenter technology, but made it all available via AWS, while Google kept everything to themselves. It was a colossal failure.
LLMs are shaping up to be the second such failure.
In both cases Google regarded the technology as a competitive advantage in the business they were in (web search), so naturally wanted to keep it internal. Maybe almost as important, they were so far ahead on those technologies that making a viable product out of them would have been a huge effort with no benefit to search. Google tech has always been an "island". Even when they did release GCP, the offerings like AppEngine and transparent networking were incomprehensible to customers who just wanted to lift-and-shift their existing datacenter, not adopt Google practices.
Amazon, on the other hand, has no qualms about converting their internal expertise into products ("turn every major cost into a source of revenue" [0]) and giving customers what they ask for.
It was a big struggle to get google to commit to cloud. When I worked there and advocated that Google needed to dive into cloud headfirst, the responses I got were a mix of "we already have appengine" (which totally misses the point) and "it's not as profitable as ads" (not many things are).
I never expected google to end up in the innovator's dilemma but here they are.
Who invented Kubernetes? Ok, water it down if you must. Which of the FAANG was in at the birth? Yep.
What Google missed on, was taking cloud outside of itself as a visible customer product. AWS leapt into the breach, but the irony is that we want to use AWS to run a technology platform which Google has significant DNA in.
No. It actually compounds the problem in some ways: Great at designing technology, poor at capitalising on it. And of course, much we attribute as great in google was acquisition, not invention. Maps? Originally I believe outside. Android? Outside. Picasa? Outside. It's a long list of amazing things, Google acquired.
Go? Inside. They hired Pike and Thompson amongst others. Kubernetes, inside. Pike and Thompson had been working on plan9, which in many respects foreshadows Kubernetes. The language couldn't really be proprietary (google maintain very strong control over it) and Kubernetes went out as an open source quite quickly. QUIC also underwent this transformation from in-house to shared.
LLMs are shaping up to be the second such failure.