It's incredibly rare for any company to produce one golden goose. It's even rarer for them to produce more than one. Google is the norm here. Chrome and Gmail

It's incredibly rare for any company to produce one golden goose. It's even rarer for them to produce more than one. Google is the norm here. Chrome and Gmail are homegrown but Maps, Youtube, Docs/Drive, the display ad business (ie DoubleClick) and Android are all acquisitions. Think of it this way: if your ad business generates $100B/year, how do you justify spending billions on something that will generate a farction of that, particularly to start? How does that effort ever compete for resources internally? And if you are successful it reaches a point where your two efforts can become competing interests.