Google is believed to assemble its SSDs, supposedly from Intel/Micron flash memory and Marvell controllers. So even though they're the same components you'd find in Intel/Crucial SSDs, Google would obviously not run in an issue due to some firmware upgrade.
They might do that, but they have also bought this SSD. Everyone large has it and/or the S3700 hanging around somewhere. It's a really solid drive and the price / performance / reliability is hard to beat (as with its predecessor, the 320).
When a giant company talks about building hardware themselves, it means that they thought they could get a better deal than their suppliers could get. At some point you're the source of your supplier's discount, rather than a beneficiary of it.
So they call up an ODM, ask for the same motherboard as always, oh but please hold the serial port to cut the BOM by $0.50. It is a custom design made for them, but it's all still built with the same commercially available stuff that everyone uses.
No one is going to design a motherboard from scratch, when they can use the Intel reference design. Likewise, that Marvell controller that Google might use on their Google-brand SSDs is going to run Marvell's standard firmware with maybe a few changes per Google's request.
I doubt Google would run into this issue in production though, because they should have an agreement that requests an exact firmware revision from their vendor. Any change to the firmware revision would require some sort of re-qualification, which should easily catch something this big.
It's still lame that Intel did this. The drive should have just been 4K when it launched, and every other drive since 2011 should be as well.
Giant companies should buy most of their hardware to reduce cost and focus on their main activity. But they should also build a small percentage of their hardware themselves to have the freedom to ditch away a supplier. This is also important to maintain good technical knowledge to negociate more wisely with suppliers.
