And so did Xerox from Apple. They were both synergistically building off of each other. . . and both were building off of Doug Englbart's from years earlier at the Stanford Research institute at Stanford University. Apple developed MANY more of the GUI standards than did Xerox, developing for example the drag and drop windows, the dropdown menuing system, nested menus, active icons, etc. That was not at all Xerox's work or anywhere near Xerox's design. All apple.
This is sort of true, although I would give Google more credit in its search engine business model than the author. Until Google came along, no one had really figured out how to make money on internet search, even Yahoo. They did it, and are still rolling in money because of it.
Google's great inventions are the algorithms that power the web crawlers searching all the websites and cataloging the entire World Wide Web, and then the other algorithms that prioritize data for display to searchers. Those were brilliant.
I also agree on Google Maps.
Did Steve Jobs Steal The iPad? Genius Inventor Alan Kay Reveals All
Bing maps is very good. I use it all the time. Google maps is only 5-10% better