> why have the majority of initiatives at Google either failed or been financially inefficient and unprofitable? If they were standalone startups, they would ha

> why have the majority of initiatives at Google either failed or been financially inefficient and unprofitable? If they were standalone startups, they would have most likely already been dead. It takes a lot of experimentation to produce hits. Even the best companies are going to have a lot of failed projects. One reason Google "appears" to have so many failures is that they're more open then other companies. No doubt Apple has tons of internal failures. Projects that don't see the light of day, get canceled if they're not looking good. Tim Cook even talks about it in interviews. I do think that Apple's producing more hits overall, but the point here is that they are not failure-free; they just don't ship crap. Google likes to publicly experiment. In the startup world this experimental function is fulfilled by the startup pool as a whole. Most will fail. Most winners have "focus, discipline, hands on management", but I'm sure that's true for most product teams at Google too.. where "management" = the local team's product & engineering management, which is more equivalent to a startup's executive team than the CEO of Google. If bigger companies want to stay innovative I think there's still a lot of value to supporting experimentation and freedom within the company. It's going to look like a lot of failure. But then so does the startup universe.