Amazon & Bezos, as one example, has failed at several very prominent efforts over the years, from competing with eBay in auctions, to competing with Google in traditional search, to the Amazon phone.

Companies should not succeed at every venture. Not only is it impossible, it's undesirable for them to succeed like that. By that standard there has never been a successful company, because nobody has managed to own everything yet.

The measure is overall value creation by the business for shareholders. Facebook is one of the greatest success stories in world business history by any reasonable measure of value creation, both in regards to its profit levels and balance sheet value increases. And they've done that in a shorter amount of time than any other company before them, with perhaps only Google a close second.

FB net tangible assets have increased from $41 billion to ~$58 billion in the last year, that's twice the net tangible assets of Microsoft. Not only does Facebook have a healthier balance sheet than Microsoft, they're going to catch them on quarterly profits within about ~18 months. Microsoft is 42 years old, Facebook is 15 years old. Facebook's net tangible assets match that of Walmart.

Here's what the balance sheets of other blue chips look like:

Coca Cola: zero net tangible assets

McDonald's: negative $5.6 billion

Oracle: negative $1.5 billion

Netflix: negative $6.7 billion

Starbucks: positive $831k

Comcast: negative $46 billion

Boeing: negative $7.7 billion

GE: negative $40 billion

AT&T: negative $78 billion

Verizon: negative $84 billion

Procter & Gamble: negative $15 billion

IBM: negative $22 billion

Pfizer: negative $33 billion

Johnson & Johnson: negative $25 billion

Lockheed: negative $15 billion

Home Depot: negative $821k

3M: negative $1.8 billion

Delta Airlines: negative $731k

UPS: negative $4.8 billion

PepsiCo: negative $17 billion

Walgreens: negative $590k