This evolutionary approach, and the Agile design processes that support it, is built into the fibre and psyche of web companies. They don't think in terms of long-term detailed plans; they think in terms of stimulus and response.
This is a dramatic change in the history of business. In the past, the nimble companies were always the little ones. The larger your company, the more it valued planning and the long-term view. Google is one of the first very large tech companies ever to pride itself on rapid response rather than rigid planning.
On top of this quick-turn bias there's the cultural training of Google's senior management. Most big companies end up being run by professional managers who came up through business school or finance, where they get trained in the rhythms and personality of traditional big business. They learn a shared vocabulary and set of values that are very familiar and comfortable to investors. By contrast, Google is completely controlled by engineering PhDs. They speak the language of science rather than business, and they're contemptuous of the vague directional platitudes and reassuring noises made by modern finance and marketing
I think most reporters and analysts don't understand how fundamentally different the engineering mindset is from traditional business thinking. It's a very distinct paradigm, unfamiliar to most people who haven't studied science.
One key element of the engineering mindset is the use of scientific method: you encourage a Darwinian marketplace of ideas, you test those ideas through controlled experiments, and you make decisions based on experimental data.
At first, Google took a different approach to the Chinese market than Yahoo did. In early 2000, Google's engineers quietly set about creating a version of their search engine that could understand character-based Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean.