It's fascinating to see how well Google has branched out. It started as just a search engine competing with Lycos, AltaVista, & Yahoo and yet they didn't just stop, they kept going. They built all these new services & products around their core product (search) and it's paid off tremendously. It's definitely something to model future companies off of. When you win the race, don't stop, keep running.
Building computer networks and artificial intelligence are pretty much Google's core competencies. Most if not all other companies would struggle to fund and develop this project. First of all, the system is in total very expensive: You don't get any coverage with just a few baloons, you probably need hundreds to make any of them stay connected to the rest of the internet most of the time. Second, this system is extr…
That's a good summary of why Google has been so successful.
They have a way of making engineers and regular people really excited about their projects. It's a feedback loop - have exciting stuff, recruit smarter people, work on more exciting stuff.