I left 5 years ago, but a friend of mine who stayed said that Google's basically given up on trying to hold the line on latency, and recent projects don't care. Which is kinda a damn shame - when we were Nooglers we fought for bytes - but I get the sense that the institutional knowledge about how much latency affects revenue left when Marissa, Amit, Craig, et al departed and Larry & Sergey moved upstairs to Alphabet. Sundar's background is Google Toolbar, Chrome, and Android, all of which are product areas where latency doesn't matter because it's installed desktop software.
