Clearly they can. Google especially likes throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. Whether or not their brand can afford the failures, is another question, but from a financial standpoint, they're much better equipped to weather a failure than Mozilla is.
I'd put the start date of the "throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks" era at 2004 and end date in late 2010 or early 2011, basically when Larry became CEO again. I started in 2009 and we were still very much encouraged to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. It continued, for me personally, until early 2013, but I suspect that company policy changed around early 2011 and it just took 2 years for the memo to filter down my management chain. (I worked in one of the oldest and most experimental departments, Search, and a bunch of my management chain was pre-IPO and so had a lot of latitude with what they did.)
