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Comment by Proven | Hacker News Reader

    HN (2024): Google cancels Blockchain services

What value can they possibly add?

I can't think of any blockchain (apart from government blockchains) that I'd avoid as much as Google's.

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>What value can they possibly add?

Maybe something to squash, say, DocuSign? Not that you need a blockchain to do that, but I can see a Google or Apple DocuSign product growing fast because they own the mobile OSes.

Google is almost a 2 trillion market cap company. Docusign is 20 bill. If some exec inside Google suggested building a team to "squash docusign" they'd be... silly.. and recognized as such.

Google is a 2 trillion market cap company with a lot of N billion dollar products, it's not that outlandish.

They weren't meant to be N billion dollar products.

Not sure I understand this. Google, for example, routinely does acquisitions well under a $20B level to enter a new market. Apigee might be a good example.

Perhaps you meant too small to occupy the entire new "Blockchain Unit"? Perhaps, but I assume they would be working on several things rather than just one.

Sure, but the goal of the acquisition is to help/kickstart something worth significantly more than that. Apigee was rolled into google cloud - that's a space worth trillions.

Docusign has a big share of the e-signature market. The market itself just isn't very big (by google standards).

Ahh, I see. I don't personally see what the big market is for anything blockchain related, so I went with one thing that seems reasonable.

yeah, it's a good question.... it could be as much for marketing/recruiting hype as anything?

Well they can dump seemingly unlimited amount of dollars into it for the next few years and maybe make something cool or at least make Blockchain more mainstream. If they dump it after that, who cares?

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