When I was at google, the one thing I took away was that most of the terrible decisions such as described above were very widely panned before being released inside the company. Everyone one of them. That doesn't mean the group of engineers was always right, but they were very good at pointing out bad, controversial ideas.
The acquisition of YouTube is one that comes to mind. While it wasn't universally panned, there were a lot of engineers (myself included) who felt it was wildly excessive.
I can't reply to that YouTube message, too much nesting? Anyway, I'll agree that YouTube was a good one. My office was doing Google video, so that project lost out.
