Look, I admit that you can't make good business decisions on Google's scale without using the data. That, however, is not Google's problem. It's also important to have vision and principles that everyone in the company understands, otherwise it's impossible to keep thousands of employees moving in the same direction. It would be very easy for Larry to make a decision like:
"One of our core values is to put engineering first, this makes us a place where the smartest engineers want to work, and keeping Google Code around is a strong external indicator of this, therefore we should spend $1,000,000/year maintaining it regardless of profits."
Despite the lack of data you could not fault a CEO for making a gut call like that. Just because you can't measure something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Ah, sorry, I had saurik's comment in mind when I wrote that.
"2) I don't think Google even tries to make things sustainable. During all of these "Google shuts down X" that have been happened recently, some posts here by ex-Google people indicated that Google internally didn't even have reporting on per-project costs... hopefully now that they see how much certain things cost they will cause less market-level problems going forward."
Look, I admit that you can't make good business decisions on Google's scale without using the data. That, however, is not Google's problem. It's also important to have vision and principles that everyone in the company understands, otherwise it's impossible to keep thousands of employees moving in the same direction. It would be very easy for Larry to make a decision like:
"One of our core values is to put engineering first, this makes us a place where the smartest engineers want to work, and keeping Google Code around is a strong external indicator of this, therefore we should spend $1,000,000/year maintaining it regardless of profits."
Despite the lack of data you could not fault a CEO for making a gut call like that. Just because you can't measure something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.