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Google acquired Skybox for $500M in 2014. Curious what changed so significantly in 2.5 years that a half a billion investment was no longer viable. Based on the
by meritt 10y ago
Google acquired Skybox for $500M in 2014. Curious what changed so significantly in 2.5 years that a half a billion investment was no longer viable. Based on the terms of this deal, it appears they were only after the imaging data itself. I'm guessing Skybox's VC demanded an exit instead of a lucrative multi-year data contract?
- madgar 10y agoRuth Porat is the change you're looking for
- justicezyx 10y agoI like the disciple. But the change is real. Google has been gradually become more and more conventional. That probably was what Larry wanted in the move of creating Alphabet, after all.
- Cheyana 10y agoYup. From Financial Review: "Before Apple’s Steve Jobs died in 2011, he told Google cofounder and CEO Larry Page that his company was trying to do too much. As Page later told the Financial Times, he replied, “If we just do the same things we did before and don’t do something new, it seems like a crime to me." Yet Page also acknowledged that Jobs was right in one sense: he could manage only so many things before too many would get lost in the shuffle." http://www.afr.com/technology/how-steve-jobs-last-advice-to-larry-page-inspired-alphabet-20150812-k9zoe http://www.afr.com/technology/how-steve-jobs-last-advice-to-...
- hueving 10y ago>Before Apple’s Steve Jobs died in 2011 This is such a strange statement to me. Is there really a chance the reader will get confused and think that Steve spoke after he died?
- rybosome 10y agoI think the value in such a comment is placing it within a timeline of the person's life. It wouldn't make sense to relate a story from 1982 and mention it relative to Jobs' death, but discussing an event that occurred months prior seems appropriate. Imagine it in the same context as "prior to his second tenure with Apple".
- cwp 10y agoNo. That's why mentioning his death is significant. It wasn't just sometime during his life, but at the very end, days before he died.
- Inconel 10y agoI'm somewhat surprised to learn that Jobs and Page were on speaking terms, particularly towards the end of Jobs' life, given the animosity, at least publicly displayed, between Apple and Google.
- mdonahoe 10y agoMy impression was that Jobs was most upset with Eric Schmidt, not Larry.
- hkmurakami 10y agoYup. Going further down the "more force behind fewer arrows" approach with fiscal discipline.
- sanguy 10y agoThey also spent $2B roughly to launch 5 additional TerraBella satellites. So $2.5B sunk into this and rumors on the street is went for a few hundred million. As a Google shareholder I'm fucking pissed.
- moretosee 10y agocurious about the sell price. > $500M or < $500M?
- swatkat 10y agoFrom this[1] TechCrunch article: >>> We’ve not heard a firm price. Aside from the $300 million figure we heard, another described Terra Bella as essentially being “donated” to Planet. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/25/google-satellite-planet/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/25/google-satellite-planet/
- tyldum 10y agoGoogle only wanted data for analytics. When Google acquired Skybox it threw out their whole business model over night. Now they are able to have data access as a service and not bother with all the maintenance. Alphabet really tries to avoid everything that isn't purely software.