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As a tech M&A guy, I'm actually surprised Google doesn't sell off more of it's corporate assets that it no longer wants to pursue. I suspect as revenues/profits
by mbesto 9y ago
As a tech M&A guy, I'm actually surprised Google doesn't sell off more of it's corporate assets that it no longer wants to pursue. I suspect as revenues/profits start to normalize (i.e. don't grow at exponential rates), the street will put more pressure on them to do so.
- ronilan 9y agoThe vast majority of what google has grown in the "moat" and the "scorched land" that surrounds "the castle" of search and paid clicks is at best useless and often toxic. And then there is YouTube. Edit: when useless, it is useless to a buyer, but not to a user. When toxic, it is toxic to both.
- mbesto 9y ago> useless to a buyer To the potential buyer of the asset or a client buying a Google service? Good example, non-Google related - Pinboard buying Delicious.
- ronilan 9y agoExcellent example. Can a one-man-show benefit from the disposal of a Google owned asset? Most likely. Parent was talking "tech M&A", "corporate assets" and "the street". Not same.
- mbesto 9y agoI was the OP btw :) I'd have to dig further but I have to imagine there are products that are created by Google that don't reach $100M+ in revenue that Google eventually folds. Something more likely - a product that is $10M in revenue that plateaus and could be sold off as an asset. I honestly don't know, just throwing it out there.
- ronilan 9y agoGoogle doesn't operate that way. Almost everything that comes out is a loss leader in one way or another (and more often than not, in one way and another). You can dig, but it will most likely be extremely hard to find a stand alone product/service that plateaued at such a revenue level. Wishing that such a product would be "created by Google" puts the bar way way too high. The Nik Collection, for example, arrived via acquisition...
- olau 9y agoCare to provide some examples? Having a bunch of happy users doesn't seem like a bad starting point for a business to me.
- hobofan 9y agoThe Nik Collection is one of the few offline products of Google, which also doesn't require any server infrastructure (AFAIK, I never used it). Most other Google products mostly live server-side, entangled with proprietary internal services and frameworks. So before selling them off, they would have to do extensive rewrites of the codebases, which might not even be possible with public tech, and also eat into one of their scarcest resources (developer time). I can understand why they'd rather kill off their services.
- bitmapbrother 9y ago>Most other Google products mostly live server-side, entangled with proprietary internal services and frameworks. Android is the world's most popular OS and can be used without Google Play Services as the billion plus devices it runs on can attest to. And then there's Chromium, the open source version of the world's most popular browser. I don't recall these products needing to live server side nor be entangled with proprietary internal services or frameworks. Additionally, there are probably no other projects that have had as much code taken freely and reused by other companies and people than these 2 open source products.
- hobofan 9y agoYes, that reasoning doesn't apply to all their products, but both Android and Chrome have a big business value for Google, as they are web clients, and allow Google to shape the web in a significant way. Especially with being in control of both a major website and a browser on desktop & mobile they can push for technologies that serve their websites needs like AMP, SPDY, QUIC, etc. like a Facebook never could.