Comment by ajross
20 hours ago
> My point on the acquisitions was that a surprising amount of their successful software was not made in house.
First, that's just not true. Their biggest products by revenue (search/adwords) and biggest stock value driver (AI/Gemini/Datacenters) are clearly in-house creations.
But even then, the two biggest "acquisitions" you're probably thinking of are YouTube and Android, acquired in 2006 and 2005 respectively. What fraction of the software base of those products do you think has survived the intervening two decades? To be blunt: most of the software being shipped out of those groups is being authored by engineers who couldn't even read when the ancestral code existed outside of Google.
Honestly the "acquisition" thing is just a cope meme promulgated by Apple stans, as it were. It's not a serious point.
I mean... First, I don't think acquisitions are automatically a bad thing. And I was largely riffing on the list the post I responded to started. Youtube, Google Docs, and Nest were all acquisitions. As noted, we can add Android.
Do these also take a lot of effort to keep going? Absolutely! But that doesn't change that they acquire a ton. They just acquired Wiz this year.
I do question a lot of the focus on a unified IDE when it comes to this strategy. It is not surprising that there is a specific "discontinued google acquisitions" page in wikipedia with that in mind.