Founders are supposed to take into consideration their product's role after acquisition when they're talking about getting bought out?
This isn't rocket science - once you sell your company to Google (or whomever), you don't own it anymore. That's why you get all those shiny coins.
Also, there are successes. Writely - > Google Docs seemed to be a pretty big success. I'm sure there are others.
The thing is that we tend to forget the successes a little bit because they got to merge so well with Google. Looking at the list of acquisitions on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_acquisitions), I can only think about Blogger but I have no experience on if it changed for the best. As far as I can tell, it looks like it's still working fine.
And just to show you that technical issues are not the primary problem, they were using Windows/C# but managed to port to Google's Linux/Java-based infrastructure and login system very quickly. (Granted, C# is way closer to Java than PHP).