What do you do when you have $43bn (£30bn) in your back pocket? Why, you buy companies like there’s no tomorrow. A couple of years ago, Google decided that it needed to get into robotics, so it went shopping for robotics companies. It picked up eight, all for the search giant’s equivalent of small change.

What the hell was a search company doing getting involved in this business? Now we know: it didn’t have a clue

From the mainstream media’s point of view, the most interesting of these acquisitions was Boston Dynamics, an east coast firm that specialised in making robots with legs. At the time, its best-known product was BigDog, a quadruped that was designed with funding from the Pentagon in the hope that it would serve as an automated pack animal for US soldiers operating in rough terrain where wheeled vehicles couldn’t go. BigDog worked as advertised, but made such a racket that any soldier hoping to surprise the enemy would have been better advised to travel with a brass band and so it was eventually retired from active service.

The Boston Dynamics robots are both impressive and creepy, as even a cursory inspection of YouTube videos will confirm. One of them – the Atlas – is a muscular-looking biped that can pick itself up off the floor after being felled by a sneaky chap with a hockey stick. What’s particularly creepy is the fact that the robot never gets annoyed, even while it is being taunted by the guy with the stick. Personally, I would have zapped him.

But I digress. The question on everyone’s mind as Google hoovered up robotics companies was: what the hell was a search company doing getting involved in this business? Now we know: it didn’t have a clue.

Last week, Bloomberg revealed that Google was putting Boston Dynamics up for sale. The official reason for unloading it is that senior executives in Alphabet, Google’s holding company, had concluded (correctly) that Boston Dynamics was years away from producing a marketable product and so was deemed disposable. Two possible buyers have been named so far – Toyota and Amazon. Both make sense for the obvious reason that they are already heavy users of robots and it’s clear that Amazon in particular would dearly love to get rid of humans in its warehouses at the earliest possible opportunity.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Atlas, the Boston Dynamics robot: a glutton for punishment. Photograph: Google/YouTube

This saga is interesting because Google is, par excellence, a technocratic outfit that worships evidence-based decision-making. In his book How Google Works, the company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, describes an organisation that is fanatically data-driven. Every procedure, every process, is relentlessly scrutinised, which is why, for example, every job interview lasts 30 minutes and offers of employment are decided by a peer-review process rather than by the most senior manager present.

That is also why the robotics buying spree seemed so weird. It was more like the acquisitive binge of a Premier League football club than the outcome of a deliberative corporate process. But most of us were so intimidated by Google’s technocratic ethos that we assumed that the company must know what it was doing. In assuming that we were clearly wrong.

So what went on? Already two interesting hypotheses have emerged, both of which are about corporate cultures. Boston Dynamics is a typical east coast outfit, a spin-off from MIT, whereas Google is a Silicon Valley creation that was originally spun off from Stanford. These two intellectual milieu are as different as chalk and cheese. (And of course Silicon Valley has never quite recovered from the fact that the arpanet, the predecessor to the internet, was originally built by a Boston-based company, Bolt, Beranek and Newman.)

A second hypothesis is also about a clash of cultures. Robotics of the kind created by Boston Dynamics is largely an analogue technology or, at any rate, an intimate fusion of digital sensors and signal processing with physical actuators that move the robot’s limbs and other moving parts. But almost everything that Google does is purely digital, so perhaps the digital immune system rejected the analogue intruder.

Whatever the explanation, the fact is that Boston Dynamics is being cut loose. And Google is returning to its digital roots, as Sundar Pichai, its new chief executive, has been explaining. Google, he says, is moving from a “mobile-first to an AI-first world”, which is a fancy way of saying that the company will be using machine-learning to make its products (mainly search) more helpful to users. We will know that he has succeeded when a Google search can answer the question: “What in God’s name possessed you to buy Boston Dynamics?”