[cyber]

> In my opinion, companies like Google build one hit after another

Wait, what? Do you have any idea how many ideas they've churned through to get the relatively few hits they've had? Wave didn't do all that well. Orkut had a decent run before they dissolved it (almost 11 years) G+ is still in question.

Yes, they've had some success with some products. And made some excellent purchase decisions (you didn't think they wrote everything they released, did you? Urchin? Writely?).

They've also killed software instead of fully developing it: notebook, reader.

And that is to say nothing of the large numbers of 20% projects. I've personally heard engineers (as a whole) at Google being chastised because the success rate of 20% projects was too high.