> Even projects with competent people in well funded companies fail all the time
Competent technical people. The non-technical leaders of for example Google Wave did not really show any apparent competency, leading to a project that has been excitedly received to stall just because someone thought it a good idea to do a closed beta (the closed beta worked for Gmail because the early Gmail users could communicate with any E-mail user, but competent people would have anticipated that this would not work with Wave; they effectively created a super-nerd ghetto, which obviously no sane person wanted to be part of after the beta was over).
Have you ever heard of hindsight bias? Many experiments have shown that people overestimate how easy it would've been to guess future outcomes. They did this by actually asking people to guess certain outcomes, then asked them a year later what their guess was - people's self-reported guesses were usually off, in the direction of what actually happened.
One of the problems with this is that our brain tricks us into believing that we're better guessers than other people, because hey, look at all the times we were right in the past! Except we weren't right - it's just our memory deceiving us.
All of this is to say - Google hires extremely smart people. I would really hesitate to call them incompetent, both because what you say was "sure to happen" is a big dose of hindsight, and also because you have no idea what their goals were - for all you know, they took a risk that the project would either stall or become super-successful, so they shot for the moon. That's a legitimate option.
Competent technical people. The non-technical leaders of for example Google Wave did not really show any apparent competency, leading to a project that has been excitedly received to stall just because someone thought it a good idea to do a closed beta (the closed beta worked for Gmail because the early Gmail users could communicate with any E-mail user, but competent people would have anticipated that this would not work with Wave; they effectively created a super-nerd ghetto, which obviously no sane person wanted to be part of after the beta was over).