Yes definitely, if the top says "we're doing it this way" then the smallest parts will have to do it that way. But in a company like Google (and IME most large companies) the top doesn't get that specific. They give broad strategic objectives and let the departments figure out the best way to achieve them. It's possible of course, but seems unlikely to me that the top would say something like, "remove RSS feed support for the developer blog." And if they did, I would expect either complete silence on the issue, or some corporatey Newspeak about it. Since they said "Unfortunately, we don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're actively working on a solution" that to me seems like a top-down direction is extremely unlikely.