I wouldn't take it that way. It's more that it would be insane to work on shared code with thousands of engineers without version control. At Bell there were far fewer programmers, so keeping track of changes would be much more straightforward.
I agree that version control is nearly essential. But Ken's phrasing was not "Well of course I use SCM for everything." it's "Google is making me." The way he said it, even in jest, suggests a bit of resentment and a feeling that it's not something he feels is best for this project for some reason.
