I don't think it's a valid argument against Google without having any data-points. I've seen many Startups also don't finish their features/products and throw away when they realize this is not the right thing to do.
Overall, don't generalize too much. Experiences are different for different people at different places.
This is some truly unavoidable thing I guess, unless you do some radical stuff like splitting apart your company in different pieces, like anti trust itself would do?
Also for me is truly disturbing the idea of being able to select people that will do great stuff just using an interview. You can just check if they understand big O, can design things, and are actually able to code. This is already a result, but I bet this also creates a monoculture as this way you create a filter that is not just cool, but also bad in some way (IMHO this is why Google fails when trying to design stuff that are designed for the masses).
disclaimer: I got a request for interview from google two times and refused it, so I'm not frustrated about that or alike.
Sure, some of those have been buyouts. But overall that is a lot of signal as far as I'm concerned.
"Originated" is also somewhat ambiguous. There are at least a couple of examples where Google was working on a project internally and saw a similar external project that they decided to acquire and merge with the internal project. Did the resulting project "originate" at Google? Even if you answer no, I think at least half of the items at that list still "originated" at Google.
For Microsoft it's Office tools, development tools and operating systems. We may not like those products, nor wish to work on those teams irrespective (I'm a UNIX hacker, there's no way I'd be happy at Microsoft, lest they bring back Xenix), but I'd imagine those teams are great to work on.
For Google, it's obviously search, infrastructure (incredible competitive advantage for them), advertising system and other things Internet or networking (including Android, Chrome etc...). It's not their office or enterprise offerings (Google docs are useful, but they're popular because they're only game in town so far).
I wouldn't join Microsoft to work on online services or join Google to work on desktop or enterprise products (with exception of Chromium). I would imagine I'd be sidelined by management or technical leadership who is just not used to that particular type of software (e.g., if you make shrink wrap office software you'd be hesitant to adopt methodologies that involve daily pushes of code or see the value of making services highly available and fault tolerant).
Of course, I am open to hear arguments to the contrary (do you work on online services at Microsoft and find that you're able to "get things done" without interference? Ditto for desktop software at Google).
We'll see how Office online plays out. And don't forget that MS Online Services has like 40million paying customers.
They also do something called XBox Live and even Hotmail has gotten a little better over time. And I find Live Mesh to be the best cloud sync'ing app I've ever used. All in all, I think they're doing OK (not great, but OK).
That's not surprising, given the person running Bing is Qi Lu. There's a reason they brought in an outsider: they just couldn't afford to screw this attempt up.
I've had the enormous privilege of working in his organization at Yahoo (I still have no idea how I was able to fool my interview panel into hiring me straight out of college and into that group).
That experience gave me an extremely highly bar in terms of choosing engineering organizations to work for. There's only a couple of non-startup companies I am willing to work at after this experience: most everyone else - including non-search parts of Yahoo - just does not get how to run an online service and are unwilling to listen to a young punk like me :-)
Being in my second job right now my heuristics are: - Strong and clear team leadership - Fitness to value proposition, besides my work as a developer how well can I contribute to help improving the organization
Would love to hear from you how to be more selective.
If anything, the converse is true: core business teams offer less opportunity to do something great, because they're bigger and less flexible.
I didn't choose Microsoft, but I had an overly simplistic view of things.
As someone who struggles to attain academic intelligence, I've focused on the other types. I've seen how that has held me back but equally I've seen how people stunning more bright than myself never reach their full potential and sometimes fail entirely.