Homework 2-23-2008 #01

1. List the companies Google acquired year by year.Briefly describe the strategic implications of each acquisition.

1. Blogger 2003/02/15 : The buyout is a huge boost to an enormously diverse genre of online publishing that has begun to change the equations of online news and information. Weblogs are frequently updated, with items appearing in reverse chronological order (the most recent postings appear first). Typically they include links to other pages on the Internet, and the topics range from technology to politics to just about anything you can name. Many weblogs invite feedback through discussion postings, and weblogs often point to other weblogs in an ecosystem of news, opinions and ideas.
2. Picasa 2006/08/15 : Google has stated that this technology will be applied to searching for photos within Picasa at some stage in the near future.
3. Youtube 2006/10/10 : Youtube is a Video web. Although Google have itself Video web,but Youtube is more popular than Google Video.
4. JotSpot 2006 10 31 : This absorb can make online synergistic techology merge into Google's online document service.
5. Endoxon 2006/12/18 : Swiss maps company . The reason is Google aim to gain their maps about Europe , and their professed techology in online maps
6. DoubleClick 2007/04/13 : DoubleClick has something that Google, for all its money and smarts, doesn't: a vibrant advertising business for banners, videos, and other so-called display ads often intended more to promote brands than to generate immediate sales
7. Feedburner 2007/05/23 : Feedburner has been a prime acquisition target for over a year, and Google needs to get into the RSS ad market.
8. Postini 2007/07/09 :
1. Make no bones about it, Google is definitely going after Microsoft's Exchange franchise. With the addition of Postini, if they just add push e-mail support and an off-line client, GMail will basically be as good, if not better than Exchange. I haven't heard anything about an off-line client for GMail but as Zimbra has demonstrated, it's possible so I would expect to see something like this from GMail in the near future. Speaking of Zimbra, IBM should buy Zimbra and kill off Notes. Zimbra is the only chance it has of keeping up with MSFT and GOOG in the e-mail race at this point.
2. This is not good news for other anti-spam companies, especially if GOOG decides to offer Postini's basic anti-spam services for free. The way Postini works (you simply redirect you MX traffic to go through their servers) reminds me of how Feedburner works. Google started offering all of Feedburner's services for free shortly after they acquired them, so it would be logical to suspect that some kind of price cut, potentially all the way to free is coming for Postini's services. That's not good for other folks out there trying to make a profit on their anti-spam services.
3. If you look at Google's recent enterprise oriented acquisitions they are building a pretty compelling set of hosted applications. Not only do they have e-mail covered but they have the big three productivity apps (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation) covered as well. They also added in Wiki capability (via JotSpot). To link all this together all they need is a hosted file server and integrated search across all these apps (basically a hosted version of Google Desktop). That's a pretty powerful suite of services.
4. Over the years, Postini received lots of inbound M&A interest, but the only bid they hit was Google's. I think this speaks to two issues that other companies attempting to compete with Google in the M&A market have: 1) Google not only can afford to pay more for companies, it does pay more. Google's competitors simply can't compete with Google's prodigious cash flow, multiples, and willingness to take dilution. 2) Google not only pays more, but is perceived as a better place to work by most targets. Thus, the management team is happy to support a Google deal because they know their team will be happy. This does not bode well in the short term for Google's competitors.
9. Marratech 2007/08/20 : Google announces it has acquired Web-based video conferencing and collaboration solutions provider Marratech.
10. Jaiku 2007/10/10 : Activity streams and mobile presence are important areas where we believe Google can add a lot of value for users. Jaiku's technology and talented team are a great addition to Google's current application and mobile teams.