&gt; In my opinion, companies like Google build one hit after another<p>Wait, what?
Do you have any idea how many ideas they&#x27;ve churned through to get the relatively few hits they&#x27;ve had?
Wave didn&#x27;t do all that well.
Orkut had a decent run before they dissolved it (almost 11 years)
G+ is still in question.<p>Yes, they&#x27;ve had some success with some products.  And made some excellent purchase decisions (you didn&#x27;t think they wrote everything they released, did you? Urchin? Writely?).<p>They&#x27;ve also killed software instead of fully developing it: notebook, reader.<p>And that is to say nothing of the large numbers of 20% projects. I&#x27;ve personally heard engineers (as a whole) at Google being chastised because the success rate of 20% projects was too high.