Hmm ? Gmail, Docs, News, Reader

Successfully bought and developed

Analytics, Blogger, Google Earth, Picasa etc

Add Docs to the "bought" list -- that was an acquisition too (of Writely).

Do any of those make money?

And they didn't really "do" youtube, they bought it. The core of the service has remained exactly the same since when it debuted.

So what? Microsoft can make & has made acquisitions too. It's not Google's fault that MS is bad at that too.

My point is simply that you can't generalize and say MS sucks at web because they've had no success at search - they have multiple platforms that are or are close to market leaders, just not search.

Can you imagine anyone writing about how Google should just admit they suck at web because they (also) only have a few actually-significant properties on the web?

There's 3 MS and 5 Google properties on this page of the top 20 web properties according to Alexa - http://www.alexa.com/topsites

Neither sucks at web as a whole. But MS sucks at trying to dislodge Google from search and Google sucks at being anything but search (and YouTube, which was already massively successful when they bought it).

YouTube isn't exactly a success either. It's unlikely they'll ever have a positive return on their investment.

I disagree with you there, I expect youtube to be profitable at some point. I don't think Google spent that much money on mindshare alone.