From Robert Scoble on why Google can’t build something like todays-darling-of-the-echo-chamber Instagram:
6. Google’s engineers can’t use any Facebook integration or dependencies like Instagram does. That makes it harder to onboard new customers. I’ve downloaded a few iPhone apps this week and signed into them, and added my friends, just by clicking once on my Facebook account. My friends are on Facebook, I don’t have a social graph even close to as good on Google. Instagram gets to use every system it wants. Google has to pay “strategy taxes.” (That’s what we called them at Microsoft).
So it isn’t just legacy that bogs down companies as they get bigger.