Do you honestly want to compare the "innovation" at Google to Microsoft or Apple? Or even Facebook (shudder!) I'm sorry, they're a bureaucratic ad company with deep pockets.

They may be the most innovative ad company, but that's not what I meant, since I was looking at it from the perspective of a user of their services. ie. their livestock, aka "the product" - end-users are most certainly not their customers and the company and all its offerings are structured in such a way that should make that pretty obvious.

I read in a fairly definitive list recently that GMail was, at least in part, the product an acquisition. I'll try to find it, the list was quite large and impressive, and really surprised me. Nonetheless, it's freaking webmail.

http://www.scores.org/graphics/google/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google

I suppose it was "portions" of GMail were developed through acquisition. The GMail wikipedia article does say it was first developed as an internal tool.