On arguments of authority

We often hear the name of the following companies associated with high technological skill and technological innovation:

facebook
microsoft
google

The following facts

facebook

• is a copy of myspace and others, that succeeded because it spread through a very fashion-addicted layer of the population, the university students - and because the alternatives sucked way too bad to be credible..
• uses mysql
• uses a php compiler rather than using proper C/Cpp for speed

microsoft

• is a collection of smart market moves, that positionned an inferior OS as the logical choice for many vendors - everyone who used a mac classic knows what I mean, DOS couldn't touch unix and windows 95 was the first time microsoft came close to apple from a visual standpoint
• is responsible for microsoft server (bad)
• has every single of its entreprise network services like DNS or AD much better served by linux appliances

google

• made ONE single search engine. that's like writing a crawler, figuring out an ok way to store data and take it out and that's it.  Sure they did it right, but mostly they were smart enough to license it to yahoo while keeping their branding and then NEVER MONETIZE it until everyone was using it (an equivalent approach to search with 20% less efficiency would have led to the exact same success).
• doesn't make that many public mistakes, but then they too use a mysql fork for some of their stuff, android is far slower than it should be on a quad core S3, implying that they too, like every other company, have hordes of average-skilled drones.

Excellent business examples, all three of them, really I admire them. but thinking they have any kind of "guaranteed tech insight" is misunderstanding their business big time.

The most innovative is google by far, and that's because they pay people to try anything and everything, and then pick what's going to market. That is sound business strategy, not tech mastery or whatever the media like to call it.