Their culture used to promote 10 or 20% time side projects, many of which became full Google projects. That will certainly lead to some abortions. However, at

Their culture used to promote 10 or 20% time side projects, many of which became full Google projects. That will certainly lead to some abortions. However, at some point there are executives deciding strategy, and almost by definition they are out of touch. From my observation, the most reliable strategy is to let a start-up with passion build something great that people want, and then buy that start-up. This is what companies older than Google have been doing for decades. (Google does it too, but they were more in-house-first in the past.)