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Regardless of how innovative Gmail and Chrome were (and I agree they were), more of Google's "innovative" products are a result of acquisition. This supports the article's hypothesis that Google's internal product innovation is not as great.

Some examples of failed innovation at Google are Wave, Allo, Chat, Plus, etc. Having worked at Google, I can count way more product failures than successes that originated internally.

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But in the real world too, way more companies fail than succeed. It would be weird if internally developed products didn't also fail a lot.

Some of the successful acquisitions (YouTube, Waze) were made at a time when they were already popular and had traction. YouTube wasn't the only video sharing site around at the time (there was even Google Video[1]) but it was obviously the most well-liked.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Video

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