Everyone spotlights the biggest success stories (in your case Google) and tries to exrapolate what the average should do to be like them.
However, the average case won't be like the outliers regardless of what methodological is followed, and maximizing the profit for the average startup is likely wildly different from maximizing the profit of the outliers.
Secondly, Google acted like an average startup--seeking funding, seeking sale to Microsoft, Yahoo, et all---until they stumbled upon their disruptive technology: ads.
So unless your startup is likely to revolutionize the industry its good advice to follow proven techniques for profit making.
Sometimes, I'd venture, that is exactly what makes the fifty first succesful.
There are guidelines to what you should do, and what you shouldn't do, but every case is different. Clearly, there are things that you aren't likely to ever want to do (rm -rf /), but there are plenty of instances in which a company didn't succeed doing x, and then a later company succeeded in doing exactly x. Whether it was due to a difference in the timing, or a difference in the market, or that something else within the company made x work differently for them than their predecessors, who knows.
Admittedly I'm just playing devil's advocate, but I feel like not enough focus is given to learning from these sorts of guides vs just blindly following them as a business plan.
Everyone spotlights the biggest success stories (in your case Google) and tries to exrapolate what the average should do to be like them.
However, the average case won't be like the outliers regardless of what methodological is followed, and maximizing the profit for the average startup is likely wildly different from maximizing the profit of the outliers.
Secondly, Google acted like an average startup--seeking funding, seeking sale to Microsoft, Yahoo, et all---until they stumbled upon their disruptive technology: ads.
So unless your startup is likely to revolutionize the industry its good advice to follow proven techniques for profit making.