Scammers (and spammers) wouldn't do this stuff if it didn't pay off.

Is the Persian Gulf unlabeled? Is it labeled "Gulf" (sounds stupid, but no reason for a lawsuit)? Is it labeled something else?

All of painting wasn't obsoleted, but photography did greatly reduce the size of the portrait-painting market, which used to be important and lucrative. Rich people paying to have their portraits painted used to be the main way a lot of artists made a living, but that occupation took a real nose-dive in the early 20th century.

The story dwells on one person's story. There are any number of people (both Americans and immigrants) who take any available job and try to work their way up, but opportunities never appear.

Google Drive does have some innovated stuff from Docs - it has awesome realtime collaboration, borrowed from Google Wave. I'd say that if you need several people editing a document at the same time, nothing beats Docs.
The only addition Google made to Docs before rebranding it into Drive is the desktop sync feature and bumping up free storage to 5 gigs. I'd say this is minor compared to existing document editing/viewing/collaboration features, which
a) Dropbox doesn't have;
b) Were steadily developed for at least 5 years.

Pretty sure it's not hard to start a restaurant that beats a bunch of mega-chain sandwich shops and burrito joints. And seriously, you consider the above options "variety"? You need to seriously expand your lunch selection.

Jeez, even the Google cafeteria has 10x the "variety" of those places, and Apple passed Google in absurd cash flow a while ago...

Versions count against your storage, trash counts against your storage, Google Docs files do not, shared files do not.

No right-click menu in the desktop client, so no grabbing public links etc.

Nope. Facebook is doing the exact same thing as every other large tech company: Microsoft, Google, Oracle, etc. (Facebook also has a lot of silicon valley vets, Zuckerberg isn't just making this stuff up as he goes.)

The idea is that you hire "raw material" (CS grads) who really don't know any engineering. Then you train them in the Company Way. Because they don't know any better, they're now bound to the company's internal processes and it makes it that much harder for them to jump-ship or work on someone else's ecosystem. They also don't get uppity and say "Let's write this in Java" or "Oracle DB does this, why are we recreating it?"

Facebook uses PHP as their internal language and the majority of CS-wonk new hires have never even used it. This is 100% by-design.

Uh, no... Physics is to Mechanical Engineering as Chemistry is to Chemical Engineering as Computer Science is to Computer Engineering.

Science is very, very different from engineering. Science is focused on the theoretical, while engineering is focused on applying that theory to the real world, subject to various resource constraints.

Given that they are so different, it makes absolutely no sense to try to group them together, especially in some attempt to "save money".

Video chat is indeed a useful feature....unless you have a Nokia Lumia Windows phone, which lacks a front-facing camera