Google has a habit of buying companies and trashing them… Today they’ve bought Etherpad and as is usual with recent purchases, signups were closed instantly, however what’s unusual is that they’ve been upfront in saying that Etherpad as a system will be killed off by March and merged into Google Wave.
Google gave the reasoning a while ago (they have to convert things to the Google Platform / Bigtable) and that takes time but whenever I see Google Buys *, I’m always worried about the future.
The day they bought Feedburner I was happy! they made all the pro features free wooo! but then it took them bloody ages to even move to the google domain… and apart from merging into analytics and adsense I think we can agree they’ve done fuck all with it.
Dodgeball Killed, Jaiku Killed Open Sourced, Jotspot… is now a shadow of its former self.
I had such high hopes for writley when they became Google Docs, I really do love Google Docs and use it everyday but If I need something serious… I use MS Office.
I don’t blame the founders of these apps, if I have an app that Google was interested in I’d probably sell to them, but I worry about the focus, in the past 5 months Google has bought 6 companies, Wheres the focus?
Blogger and Orkut seem to be left out in the cold while the new kids on the block, Gmail and Chrome get all the attention from the parents.
Pet projects like Google DNS are fine but I’ve been trying to get some support from Google Calendar for ages and I keep hitting walls. (I do like how the DNS service has telephone support which is a change from Google Properties).
I wish the cool people at Yahoo (the ones that are left anyway) had the budgets of the people who work at Google.
Related posts:
- Reverse Geocoding With The Google Maps API I’ve been playing a lot with Geocoding over the past...
Alistair MacDonald (2)
Barry Carlyon (2)
Caius (2)
David Whitehouse (2)
Joff (2)
Katie (2)
Lee Bandoni (2)
Mark Walters (2)
Abbie (1)
AlphabUX (1)
Arguably, Jaiku, Jotspot and Dodgeball never really gained traction…also, Google often uses acquisition as a recruitment strategy; Dodgeball was such as case (also see Fred Wilson’s post today at http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/12/the-hr-acquisition.html).
However, Writely and Android also demonstrate great tech + ppl acquisitions for Google.
Six acquisitions in 5 months isn’t unusual – Microsoft was averaging one a month through most of the early part of the century…they’re all gambles to an extent, so it’s reasonable to expect some of them to fail.