In trying to name Google’s Achilles’ heels, is a cloistered workforce among them? I don’t know that Bell Labs technologists were out mixing with the hoi polloi either, but that outfit was a government sponsored monopoly that didn’t have to worry about competition. From Frédéric Filloux at Quartz:

“Google’s disconnect from the outside world keeps growing. More than ever, it looks like an insulated community, nurturing its own vision of the digital world, with less and less concern for its users who also happen to be its customers. It looks like Google lives in its own space-time (which is not completely a figure of speech since the company maintains its own set of atomic clocks to synchronize its data centers across the world independently from official time sources). 

You can actually feel it when hanging around its vast campus, where large luxury buses coming from San Francisco pour out scores of young people, mostly male (70%) mostly white (61%), produced by the same set of top universities (in order: Stanford, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, UCLA…) They are pampered, with free food, on location dental care, etc. They see the world through the mirrored glass of their offices, their computer screens and the reams of data that constitute their daily reality.

Google is a brainy but also messy company where the left hemisphere ignores what the other one does. Since the right one (the engineers) is particularly creative and productive, the left brain suffers a lot.”