Comment by shanemhansen

I had a big comment here, but I erased it. I think one story proves my point. When talking to google engineers one thing I noticed was that they considered youtube to basically be a joke. The reason why is that youtube has a messy python codebase. I asked them what they worked on while they were at google. They had rewritten an internal web portal for a support tool. From everything I can tell it was literally a mysql crud app.

If this is how success and failure are determined at google, it's no surprise how many of their products that people actually use come from acquisitions.