What they had was a strong guy in charge who could make absolutely sure the development of the company's idea followed the vision. They are highly successful becasue of it.
Bitcoin does not have it.
There is a large group of different people all with different ideas on how to carry out the vision, and no-one to ensure a consistent focus. Running a large-scale operation does not work using consensus. Instead it always leads to disagreement and a failure of the project. So it will be with Bitcoin where the recent civil wars with alt coins is only the beginning.
This is just a FUD and masked altcoin/hardfork propaganda. To say that Bitcoin can not succeed because it doesn't have centralized development is the same as saying that open source projects are impossible, and this is obviously wrong, since there are thousands of successful projects that has been around for many years and even decades. It's also a lie that there's some "civil war" going on in Bitcoin community, as big blocks supporters are just tiny minority - it can be proven by the fact that Bitcoin's price remain stable and growing despite all the forks that happened recently, low node count for those forks and the fact that there's very few real users who support forks - most of them are just shills with fresh/farmed/bought accounts.