On Google’s acquisition strategy

Posted by Fred Oliveira on January 27, 2009 | Comments (6)

What do Jaiku, Dodgeball, Grandcentral and Feedburner have in common? They’re all companies that Google acquired and didn’t do much with ever since.

newyear09 From an outsiders’ perspective, it is pretty odd that Google is acquiring good ideas and businesses and letting them fade slowly. It is easy to assess why Google acquired these companies (for the talent, technology or just for the modjo), but not having a structure to deal with the new intellectual property seems a bit clumsy, particularly coming from people we’re used to seeing excel when it comes to launching products.

What I’d love to see? Google integrating some of this acquired IP into their core offerings. Dodgeball, Jaiku and Orkut should live together. Feedburner and Google Analytics were made for eachother. Grandcentral would be ace tied to “Google Apps for your domain”. I wouldn’t be bummed if they actually brought all these companies down if their functionality were to appear elsewhere within the Google universe.

I’m pretty sure there’s people at Google who can build and implement this strategy. But please stop leaving these things (some of them with quite a chunk of users) in the acquisition closet.

Comments on this post

I remember when exactly the same thing was said about MSFT’s acquisition strategy. By then, the word on the street was that they bought whomever might be a threat on their own agenda. It might have been the case here and there although they have actually used some of the technology on their products.

Funny (but predictable) to hear people saying just the same about Google.

Of course there’s always the usual answer: “Why did we buy it? Because we can”

Great opinion that you wave in there. In fact Google acquired many companies, but the question is, “For what”?!

Does Google acquired those companies to make them better? Extracting the juice, add some sugar and making lemonade? Like it did with YouTube.
Or Google do this kind of things like some kid do with the new brand of gums? Taste it… Eat the sugar and throw it away?

Google buyed Jaiku, expeting to be greater than twitter, but it got wrong. And now he giving the code to the people… For what? In my opinin it’s to take some power of twitter.

Maybe…

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Regards,
Vitor Caneco.

Absolutely, Eduardo. :)

It’s not just Google or MSFT too… look at how long it took for Yahoo! to do something about del.icio.us, for example.

You’re right Fred, Grandcentral would be a killer if it was merged with GApps. No arguing there. But I’m guessing it’s easier said than done. Specially for this little corner of the Earth.

Now, in all fairness, we the users actually felt the purchase of Feedburner. You started getting features for free that were for paid-users only. It’s not much of an integration with Google services like you suggested, but it’s not like they just put it on a shelf for show off-ing. :)

Good post. It’s almost funny that the big tech companies have such a poor track record with acquisitions.

The best examples from the top of my head are Google with Jaiku as mentioned, Microsoft with Danger and most famously eBay with Skype.

This is not your point but there seems to be a merge of paths of Google’s aquisition strategy and MSFTs will to defeat competitors/destroy good ideas. The effect on bought companies is the same even if the reason is different (is it really?).

The crisis may not be allowing Google to invest time, therefore money, into all projects. Even really useful ones – not bought – are being shut (google notebook for example).

Is the great Google implosion coming? Let me know, so I can create an Hotmail account (:P).

Grand Central does seem to have been worked on (google voice) , and i can imagine this become quiet important to google…

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