Google’s Acquisition Singularity
August 15, 2008
Farhad Manjoo’s “The Google Black Hole” in the August 13, 2008, Slate here is a quite interesting essay. The premise is simple: Google buys hot companies and fumbles the ball. Mr. Manjoo is more delicate, which is understandable because Slate is a real digital publication. My Web log is the work of an addled goose. For me the most interesting comment in the write up was this statement attributed to a Google employee: “It takes work to move a new company onto Google’s systems.” From this I conclude that Google is human, not a borg. The difficulty of integrating a third party innovation into Google plagues other companies. In my research, I identified several reasons for a Google acquisition. Let me highlight several not mentioned in Mr. Manjoo’s article:
- The buy is Googley; that is, someone in the company makes a compelling case to buy an “interesting company”. I think Dodgeball (the orphaned social game) falls in this category.
- Let’s beat a competitor to the punch. I think a good example of this is Google’s purchase of Keyhole, a vendor working with Microsoft prior to Google’s snapping up the company, beating Microsoft to the Web with geo-spatial imaging, and starting the “earth and map” push into the enterprise.
- Buy experts, know how, and leap frog technology. I would put Google’s purchase of Transformic in this category.
- Get content. Google bought Deja News for clicks and content.
- Get publishing and structured data functions. JotSpot falls into this category.
- Get an edge in ad matching. The purchase of Applied Semantics delivered in this category.
There are others, and I detail them in my various for fee studies from Infonortics and the Gilbane Group. You can see a partial list of Google acquisitions on Wikipedia here, but the list is not comprehensive. There is more to Google’s acquisitions than black holes. Think singularities that transform. A new for fee study on this subject will be available from IDC in the near future.
Stephen Arnold, August 15, 2008
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[…] ScottGu Farhad Manjoo’s “The Google Black Hole” in the August 13, 2008, Slate here is a quite interesting essay. The premise is simple: Google buys hot companies and fumbles the ball. Mr. Manjoo is more delicate, which is understandable because Slate is a real digital publication. My Web log is the … […]
There’s a more cynical reason – buy it to kill it. This probably doesn’t fit with the ‘do no evil’ motto of course, but it’s common for large companies to buy small companies just to make them go away….