• Do something no one else is doing. This is normal choosing your niche stuff. Google went into search at a time when other companies didn't see any market. They were focused on producing portals that attempted to be everyone's gateway to everything on the net i.e. Yahoo! and MSN. This leads to the next point...
• Be really good at something, then you can be good at everything. When they started out, the Google guys focused just on being the best at producing relevant search results to searchers. That was it. They went against the trend of producing portals. Now, they seem to have their mark on everything on the web; news, video, open source programming, health research venturing into offline business ventures too. Once one can conquer one field, it seems it is possible to move on to new territories.

More to come...