Google's Rules of Acquisition 115
waderoush writes "For many startup entrepreneurs, getting acquired by Google is the dream exit. But these days Google is getting a lot more discriminating about what kinds of companies it buys — and a lot more careful about how it integrates newly acquired teams. This article offers an in-depth look at how Google achieves a two-thirds success rate with acquisitions, and why things still occasionally go south. 'The return on our acquisition dollars has been extraordinary,' says vice president of business development David Lawee, Google's M&A czar. But Google insiders say it still takes a lot of work to make sure acquired startups go the way of Android (the mobile operating system, acquired in 2005) and not Aardvark (the social search site, acquired in 2010 and shut down in 2011)."
Contacting Google is VERY difficult (Score:4, Interesting)
And I thought google might be interested as with their webmaster center tools, the same task takes ~30 minutes (to match the colors to the hosting web-page).
As Adsense is basically their money making machine, so one might think they would be interested to see a demo of that technology - NOT.
As of now there's probably noone at the google who knows about the tool / technology. And it is not because I would not have tried enough. To summarise I tried to call to at least 30 people at the Google headquarters (found couple of answering machines) , I send a message *twice* to all kinds of "business proposal" "partner with google" mailboxes at Google's website. And based on my logs nobody ever came to test drive the tool. And I send a message to Google adsense forum. Still no comment from anyone. And I kept calling google offices around Europe and the most human contact was with the telephone answering machine. Well, except in spain and (I think) Norway? there was a receptionis who said she was just a hired office receptionist not working for google and there's noone at google she could connect me to.
And, here in Finland, I saw Google opened office in Oulu, So I went there and meet em in person. And at the lobby hall I said I have a tood / demo that might interest Google. But no, she basically run away without checking the demo. Later last summer I challenged someone who had been co-operating with Googles Finnish leader Anni Ronkainen to try to get her to check the demo. But as this helpful person tried to reach CEO Anni Ronkainen, she never came back to this PhD lecturer person with whom she actually had agreed partisipate at a seminar later. And I send Anni couple sms - messagea asking to contact me - no reply. And someone suggested I might be able to connect Google people through one ad agency that does online-ad campaings with google, no that didn't work eather. And it didn't work eather through another guy who had written PhD thesis online advertisement - even he wan's able to contact anyone there - PhD guy was at least facined about the technology.)
To summarize, my experience is that nobody works at Google. The company is probably a front office and run by Skynet or something.
Re:Aardvark the extension (Score:2, Interesting)
Correction: Google's main business is ads. They just happen to go very well with search.
Can we please put a stop to this FUD? You're just repeating Microsoft talking points.
Google does not own you. The only way they get access to your eyeballs is with your consent. You are the customer, not the product. It is 2012, people are not products. Advertising is a product. You consume the product. It is a product with negative value, so Google pays you to consume it, in the form of barter for services. They must provide you with enough value to keep you consuming the product, because you are the customer, not the product. You are the customer of the ads and the customer of the services. The advertisers are not customers, they are suppliers. They supply one of the products, the ads. Google provides the other product, the services. Google is in the web service industry, because that is the product they actually make, and the one that actually has value to you, the customer. There are no ads without services.
It bears keeping in mind why the exchange of services for ads takes place. They could charge money instead. The reason that they don't is that the typical customer values their own money more than they value the cost of consuming that amount of advertising. You would rather consume an ad than pay a penny. The advertiser is willing to pay a penny for you to consume an ad. In consequence, instead of a straight transaction of web services for money, we have a three-party transaction where you consume Google web services and pay for them by consuming some third party's advertising, because that transaction is Pareto efficient over the one where you pay money for services. But that doesn't make the provider of web services an advertising company. They're still providing web services and you are still choosing whether to consume them over the alternatives.
Now, you might point out, Google owns Doubleclick and operates an advertising network. And in that respect their business is advertising -- but that isn't their main business. If Google discontinued all of their web services but continued their ad network as supplied to third parties, they would lose the large majority of their revenues. If they kept the web services and then discontinued their internal advertising network and instead used a third party's, they would keep the large majority of their revenues. What does that tell you about which one is their main business?
Re:Aardvark the extension (Score:4, Interesting)
That is a contradiction. Which is it? Customers pay money. That's how it works. Otherwise they are not customers. You have buyers and sellers, products, and end users. You can tell which is which by following the money.
The way Google looks at it is that both the users and the advertisers are customers. Of the two, Google focuses the vast majority of its attention on the users, not the advertisers. The reason is that Google largely views the money as a means to an end. The end is to create cool technology that improves peoples' lives.
Okay, I know you're barfing... but I'm telling you that's what people inside Google really talk about and focus on, at all levels, impossible as it may seem to believe of a for-profit corporation. The advertising, and other (much smaller) revenue streams, are seen as an unfortunately-necessary diversion from the main task, one that is justified in part with the idea that advertising can theoretically provide useful information to users, if it's well-targeted and not annoying.
Granted, there's a little cognitive dissonance in this viewpoint. If Google employees were really all about making the world a better place, we'd forgo our nice salaries, expensive offices and all of the well-publicized perks. But it's a cognitive dissonance that rarely comes to the surface, because so far in the company's history, other than the first big concession to reality when Page and Brin decided they could swallow their pride and sell advertising, the money has pretty much rolled in continuously, in ever-increasing amounts, so no one really feels the conflict between do-gooder intent and the necessity of collecting tens of billions of dollars. I mean, thanks to the AdWords auction, Google doesn't even have to dirty itself setting prices. The advertisers set the prices they pay to Google, and they just keep bidding 'em up.
The result is that the academic, blue-sky, make-the-world-better thinking that Google claims, really is how the company's collective culture "thinks", and the "Don't Be Evil" mantra really is important. The funny thing about this situation is that everyone who is used to the way that normal companies behave looks at this and assumes that it must be fake, because no corporation could really be like that. Therefore, it must not only not be true, but there must clearly be a concerted attempt to hide the truth from the world. All this do-gooderness must be a sham front put up to hide some deep, nefarious plot. So, when Google stumbles and does something that isn't so good for the world, people cry "Ah ha! I knew it! They really are Evil!". And even when Google doesn't stumble, widespread skepticism ensues.
All of this, of course, is really annoying and disheartening to Google insiders who spend their days focused on trying to create the next great improvement in Google's services, or the next great service, or even just improving the user experience of what Google does now. And so there is much unhappiness among Google employees about the way some of the world views their selfless work. Unhappiness which is typically expressed while drinking free barista-prepared lattes after a free gourmet lunch before hitting the free gym and then returning to their cubes in posh offices and working on their expensive computers before going home to estimate their next bonus and tot up the value of their next block of stock to vest.
Yes, Google is a weird place. But, honestly, profits really are a second-order concern, because -- so far -- as long as Google has made users happy, advertisers have been happy to keep throwing money. So advertisers really aren't the focus of the vast majority of Googlers.