There was a time many years ago when google gave engineers free rein. The engineers kept coming up with new blockbuster products like gmail and maps, but the designers hated Google. They complained that the engineers shouldn't be designing the products, that the interfaces were ugly and cluttered. Cluttered because they exposed ways to manipulate all the features that the engineers had created.

So Google hired tons of designers to fix this, and gave them high level positions to make product decisions. The designers now run the company so we get new paint on the old products. The innovation is only on new designs and interactions.