That's the slightly cynical view. Another is that they want the team. Yet another that seems most plausible to me is that pre-revenue probably means pre-baggag

That's the slightly cynical view. Another is that they want the team. Yet another that seems most plausible to me is that pre-revenue probably means pre-baggage. If they want to shut down the service & use the technology in some new or existing Google service but some users have already prepayed for two years, how do they get out of that? A variation of your suggestion is that they aren't really interested in your revenue so they don't want to pay for it. Most of Google's products are not directly revenue generating. That makes some sense to me. They don't want 200 $5m businesses. They want to add another billion to their existing businesses or build a new billion dollar business. Look over these acquisitions. In which case was google out to 'buy a business' in the revenue/cashflow sense? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google