I was there at the time. It is not just that Google is good at certain things. It is also that the developers who built orkut were very very bright new developers (many just out of college) who lacked experience. The brazilians took over orkut and the developers were unable to make tough decisions; like starting fresh. They also made the friendster mistake; their first implementation couldn't scale and by the time the fixed it, it was too late. Furthermore, at the time, google had a policy of assigning managers to cover a very large number of developers and although the orkut manager was very sharp, he didn't have more than a few hours a week to provide leadership. The final issue, was that orkut had a huge usage rate and no other service (gmail, picasa, etc) would accept an integration with orkut because it meant having to handle the huge additional load. Google needed Larry to step in and tell people they had to make it work. This is a classic example of a failure of one of Google's core development philosophies: "Developers don't need management or experience; they can find the right solution using intelligence alone; you should never tell developers what to do." (full disclosure -- they kicked me out of the group so my opinion is biased; please take that into account).