It's not about hiring engineers, it's about looking 10-15 years ahead.  At this stage, 5 years ahead would be an improvement, because most older companies seem to live quarter-to-quarter or year-to-year in their projections.<p>I'm shocked that more companies aren't trying the Google approach: load a whole bunch of ideas in a shotgun and fire them at the wall.  Keep the ones that stick as betas and eventually full products, and dump failures.  It's not that Google has a better ability to predict the turn of the industry, it's that they've got ten thousand projects in various stages of development from "engineer's sketchpad" to Google Labs, so whenever some new trend peeks over the horizon, their app is already half-done.