> occasionally some products will test the waters and fail.
Most of the time "fail" just means "fail to become a category-defining product," whereas any other software company would be happy to pull the kind of numbers Google does for its smaller projects. If Google wants to operate like a venture capital firm, investing in many products and seeing most fail to get huge, than that's fine, but they need to consider the negative impact it has on their brand and on all future product launches.
Most of the time "fail" just means "fail to become a category-defining product," whereas any other software company would be happy to pull the kind of numbers Google does for its smaller projects. If Google wants to operate like a venture capital firm, investing in many products and seeing most fail to get huge, than that's fine, but they need to consider the negative impact it has on their brand and on all future product launches.