When I moved from ads to Android, I was shocked at how different Android was from the rest of Google. Android address engineering problems quite differently. Suppose you had a giant, overwhelming engineering problem like "built a web browser" or "build a mobile operating system"...
The Google part of the company would say, "That's an ambitious goal. Let's put a lot of engineers on it."
The Android part of the company would say, "That's an ambitious goal. Let's pick a simpler goal first."
It turns out that each strategy is right. For Google, writing code for fast desktops and large screens, you can always do more. For Android, writing code for slow CPUs & small screens, you must always simplify.
