That's what made it kind of an interesting read. All of the 'nicer Larry' projects in the article flopped, from Google+ to wearables to unsupervised learning being useful commercially.
Google's biggest business failing around that era was how far behind they were in cloud computing. GCE only launched in 2013. EC2 launched 2007-ish. In 2014, unless you were paying attention to Amazon, it wasn't obvious how big of a blunder this was, yet.