> Why not just make these things offshoot startups with a little seed money and a lot of shares for said seed mone IMO, this is a great idea. Both SAP and IBM

> Why not just make these things offshoot startups with a little seed money and a lot of shares for said seed mone IMO, this is a great idea. Both SAP and IBM do this with acquisitions that didn't take or internal projects that don't line up with the strategic plan, and it works alright for them: see Qualtrics and Acoustic.co The only theory I have for why Google hasn't done this is because they're run by engineers and not finance guys, and they think managing a reorg like that would hurt their momentum. but that's just a guess. > At this point, everyone is sliently praying Gmail survives whatever internal war Google has when it comes to axing products. I don't think we need to worry too much about this, since Google has monetized GMail through GSuite for businesses, universities, etc.