List Of Acquisitions By Google | Hacker News Reader

List Of Acquisitions By Google

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24 pointsrams17 comments

I don't see why the list is deeply interesting. Maybe some analysis on the list would be more valuable than the list itself.

when you think of how many non-web-search-related things google does, this list shows that so many of them were created by someone else that google just swallowed up, and are not the result of the many smart employees at google.

how many google services were completely created there? pagerank, gmail, and orkut?

Err ... orkut was not actually strictly a google product because they didn't think up that idea as a product and worked on it. The guy who made orkut - Orkut Buyukkokten - was just working on his 20% free time to build it, and then they liked it and just released it as a product.

reference - http://searchenginewatch.com/3302741

Its kinda interesting that Google has developed only Gmail as an inhouse product till now !

So the problem with this kind of reasoning is that you deny what happens to companies after they are acquired. Look at Keyhole, which became Google earth. This was a small company in Maryland with a small audience of paid, mostly government and enterprise, users. They were purchased and in a remarkably short amount of time, ported their imagine serving to googles infrasctructed, expanded coverage and deployed the free Google Earth to tens of millions of people worldwide. This would not have been possible without the use of Googles operations and data center people and hardware, or the storage technologies that uses them.

Similarly, look at Android. Android was purchased very early in their development cycle, and literally grew to a team of hundreds at Google, where the bulk of the work that went into that took place.

This is not to discount that we buy companies because they are doing something interesting/cool/new/smart, but to discount what happens after denies a very large part of how large businesses work.

Maybe what I'm trying to say is if Google can take a legitimate hit when an acquisition goes poorly (dodgeball comes to mind) then maybe it is worth considering what happens when acquisitions come off.

To actually answer your question, gmail, pr, gfs, bigtable, orkut (As a stealthy side project kind of thing), google news, finance, google talk, the igoogle homepage and the gadget spec therein which lead to opensocial, streetview, containerized and large scale data center operations, etc, etc,etc..

But that also discounts the value we've seen from our adoption of open source technologies and the day to day work of thousands of engineers.

Maybe what I'm trying to say is that (ugh, I hate this word) innovation is wherever you find it, and a decent company tries to find it everywhere.

Its pretty interesting that Google seems to acquire several companies, and then awhile later mix them all together and launch something else.

I imagine infrastructure and code can rarely be reused from company to company, so I'm not quite sure what Google gets out of the acquisitions.

Sorry I don't have a link, but I remember reading that while it is wonderful to be acquired by Google, it was a considerable challenge to make your product run on Google's infrastructure. How many times have we seen a product change dramatically or be shut down after acquisition by Google? Writely, JotSpot, Dodgeball, and Jaiku come to mind. Android eventually became something very important. In acquiring, Google gets talent, publicity, and code.

Writely became Google Docs and JotSpot became Google Sites.

Dodgeball and Jaiku are good examples of what you're talking about, though...

Dodgeball ended up becoming Latitude didn't it? It seems most products are really transformed post-acquisition (which is probably hard on the founders)

This list is interesting, but it really doesn't surprise me that so many of the Google features we know and love were acquired.

Acquisition for a company like Google is smart business. While we don't know the specific dollar amount that Google paid for most of these companies, it was almost certainly less than the cost of than paying Google developers to develop these features from scratch, especially when you factor in the opportunity cost of revenue and traffic lost during the time it takes to develop the product.

Ah, Wikipedia... Google failed to acquire Begun (Russian context ad company), because Russian antitrust agency stopped the deal. (Edited the Wikipedia article accordingly).

Must admit that #1 grabs my eye straight away - I still miss DejaNews (but I still have to respect Google for keeping this information alive and accessible).

I have no respect for them. They ruined DejaNews, by deleting anything imaginable. But people should have done an open source/free DejaNews alternative by archiving newsgroups. Where oh where is the competition?

Yeah I know - but Deja was going under.

Baidu?

AOL?

Not accurate?

Footnotes:

  * A Purchased a 2.6% share.
  * B Purchased a 5% share.
  * C Purchased a 4% share.

Legend:

  A - Baidu
  B - AOL
  C - Xunlei

It's a wiki, so I could add my own company to the list and let it become a self-fulfilling prophecy...

For it to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, Google would have to acquire you because they saw their own Wikipedia page.

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