Hacker News Reader

Keyhole -> Google Earth was a big success too.

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.

Yeah, Writely is a great counterexample. Their vision and Google's vision were really close, so they integrated well into Docs.

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).

Applied Semantics -> AdSense, AdWords