Brian Reid was kicked out of Google by Urs Holzle ahead of the IPO after helping to build the company (so much for don't be evil and all that). I don't think the issue here is age discrimination - Geoffrey Hinton is in his late 60s - but rather that his skillset is not sufficiently critical to Google's flavor of the week to merit special treatment.
But as an ex-googler myself, they have become amazingly rigid and bureaucratic compared to who they were even 5 years ago. And end-user experiences of services like GMail and youtube are atrocious. I have a love/hate relationship with Android, but to stay in that relationship I had to ditch 2-year device contracts so I could keep up with whatever brand new shiny gets 6-12 months of tech support before being brickified.
Microsoft disrupted IBM. Google disrupted Microsoft. Who's going to ruin Google's day and relegate them to a 2nd tier player?
Hopefully it will be someone who values privacy. I look at the generally negative reaction to Google buying nest and can't help but think if it had happened a year or two earlier the reaction would have been completely opposite.
