Yes, although in some ways MSR is less in the bubble than the rest of the company -- people go to conferences and are aware of what's happening elsewhere. Microsoft's bubble applies just as much here as Google's: I'm sure a lot of folks there can't understand why Google or anybody else would think there's anything wrong with what they did here. When bubbles collide.
My charter back in 2006-7 was "game-changing strategies", which meant getting people to think outside the bubble. So we did a lot of work analyzing Google's, Yahoo's, and Microsoft's corporate culture. One of the things that's core to Google's identity is preferring algorithms to anything that has to do with people, and that's very much on display with Binggate.
The comments on this subject seem very polarised and it is interesting to look at the background of the commenters.