4 ms·

This is a strange analysis. "Number of acquisitions" seems like a weird metric, without accounting for their significance (in purchase price, impact on the busi

by dkyc 5y ago

This is a strange analysis. "Number of acquisitions" seems like a weird metric, without accounting for their significance (in purchase price, impact on the business, or any other real-world metric). facebook buying Instagram was probably more significant than all the other acquisitions combined.

Alex3917 5y ago
> facebook buying Instagram was probably more significant than all the other acquisitions combined. Deja News was probably the biggest tech acquisition by a FAANG company. The average white collar worker spends ~6 hours a day in their Gmail, and about 5 min a day using search.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  How did buying Deja’s hard drives — they did not acquire the company, only “significant assets” — lead to Gmail?
  - Alex3917 5y ago
    IIRC their email parsing code became the basis of Google Groups, which then became the basis of Gmail.
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      As someone intimately familiar with that software, I doubt this. Every line of the Gmail delivery stack is home-grown, but if you were to identify an acquisition that most influenced the project it would be Neotonic, not Deja.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - throwaway3699 5y ago
        Gmail started life as a 20% project that was basically a Frankenstein version of Google Groups.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        Alex3917 5y ago
        Yeah, this is the version I remember also. PB has said many times that he built the first version that could only display threads of his own email in a day. But going from a series of raw email messages to an email thread that can be displayed conversationally on the web is a multi-year project, so clearly there was some already existing code doing the heavy lifting. E.g. the email parsing code in Thunderbird dates back to at least the late 80s, and even after decades of working on it at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, it's still a work in progress.
        jldugger 5y ago
        I mean, the UI/theme was clearly borrowed, but that's not necessarily any indication of the backend implementation. And they probably both use bigtable, but so did basically everything customer facing at the time.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I'd have estimated more like 10x that on search and around 1/4 of that in gmail.
mrkurt 5y ago
Google buying Doubleclick helped them crush the ad market for publishers. Number of acquisitions is interesting, though, because you can also phrase it as "number of potentially viable independent companies that no longer exist". We are better off with more independent companies.
- dageshi 5y ago
  They all learned from MS. MS tried to buy Netscape but didn't offer enough and got turned down. So MS set out to use its position to boost its own browser instead, anti-trust followed because it was obvious MS was using its position to muscle out an independent company. For the big Tech companies now, small acquisitions are win win wins, they get the people, they get whatever was developed and they permanently avoid Microsofts Netscape situation. That being said, I'm guessing no small number of these startups were setup with the express purpose of being bought out like this.
  - pjmorris 5y ago
    > For the big Tech companies now, small acquisitions are win win wins, they get the people, they get whatever was developed and they permanently avoid Microsofts Netscape situation. I have a theory that this is why MS treats its research division staff and interns so well. It reduces the amount of competitive pressure MS would face if they were all working elsewhere/on their own startups.
CarelessExpert 5y ago
> "Number of acquisitions" seems like a weird metric, without accounting for their significance (in purchase price, impact on the business, or any other real-world metric). This comment sounds like the nirvana fallacy striking again. There is no perfect metric for measuring something like overall market dominance. Thanks to a series of supreme court rulings, the traditional approach has been to look at consumer harms. But that metric alone fails to account for the way modern large conglomerates make money: not by gouging the consumer, but by dominating entire industries. So how else can you look at it? Acquisition are just another lens. Is it an imperfect lens? Yes, of course. I challenge you to find an analysis that isn't. But is it still meaningful? Yes, I absolutely think so! It is undeniably the case that these tech giants have used acquisitions as a way to protect their market position. So it absolutely makes sense to analyze their behaviour from that perspective. Furthermore, this is a news article not a whitepaper. Yes, there is an enormous amount of nuance in this kind of argument, and if you were prosecuting these guys for antitrust violations in a court of law, you'd probably do a deeper dive. > facebook buying Instagram was probably more significant than all the other acquisitions combined. How do you know that? There's simply no way to know how some of these companies would've fared because these anti-competitive practices have ensured that promising startups are smothered before they become a threat.
- scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago
  Alot to agree with here - how would Google have faired without being able to strategically acquire companies that made specific tech for ads and search?
- piva00 5y ago
  > How do you know that? There's simply no way to know how some of these companies would've fared because these anti-competitive practices have ensured that promising startups are smothered before they become a threat. Exactly, and adding to that: what about the tons of smaller companies/startups bought for a unique technology that was implemented under the hood across major products of the tech giants? We don't know about them except if some former employee leaked it, most projects will be private/secret and the public at large will never heard about the impact. Think lots of small "Doubleclick"-ish companies that were bought for a small set of features that were then transferred to major products.
ahartmetz 5y ago
It makes some sense. The more acquisitions, the higher the chance of doing well (that wording doesn't apply to price) in the metrics you mention. Especially if the perspective is extrapolating the past to the future. The thesis of the articles seems to be: Big tech will stay dominant because they will keep buying lots of companies and they will likely continue to win with some. To stop this, blah blah law changes or something (I only skimmed the article).
the_duke 5y ago
Many corporate acquisitions have the sole purpose of killing off/absorbing companies early, before they gain traction in the market and become viable competitors. Focusing on real world metrics will give a very incomplete picture of the impact acquisitions might have had on the market.
divbzero 5y ago
Yes, I would have wanted to see the graph of acquisitions weighted by purchase price but that data is hard to find for many acquisitions. Impact on business (e.g., revenue contribution) would be even better but requires subjective judgment and estimation.

by dkyc 5y ago

Alex3917 5y ago

> facebook buying Instagram was probably more significant than all the other acquisitions combined. Deja News was probably the biggest tech acquisition by a FAANG company. The average white collar worker spends ~6 hours a day in their Gmail, and about 5 min a day using search.

jeffbee 5y ago
How did buying Deja’s hard drives — they did not acquire the company, only “significant assets” — lead to Gmail?
- Alex3917 5y ago
  IIRC their email parsing code became the basis of Google Groups, which then became the basis of Gmail.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    As someone intimately familiar with that software, I doubt this. Every line of the Gmail delivery stack is home-grown, but if you were to identify an acquisition that most influenced the project it would be Neotonic, not Deja.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - throwaway3699 5y ago
      Gmail started life as a 20% project that was basically a Frankenstein version of Google Groups.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - Alex3917 5y ago
        Yeah, this is the version I remember also. PB has said many times that he built the first version that could only display threads of his own email in a day. But going from a series of raw email messages to an email thread that can be displayed conversationally on the web is a multi-year project, so clearly there was some already existing code doing the heavy lifting. E.g. the email parsing code in Thunderbird dates back to at least the late 80s, and even after decades of working on it at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, it's still a work in progress.
      - jldugger 5y ago
        I mean, the UI/theme was clearly borrowed, but that's not necessarily any indication of the backend implementation. And they probably both use bigtable, but so did basically everything customer facing at the time.
sokoloff 5y ago
I'd have estimated more like 10x that on search and around 1/4 of that in gmail.

mrkurt 5y ago

Google buying Doubleclick helped them crush the ad market for publishers. Number of acquisitions is interesting, though, because you can also phrase it as "number of potentially viable independent companies that no longer exist". We are better off with more independent companies.

dageshi 5y ago
They all learned from MS. MS tried to buy Netscape but didn't offer enough and got turned down. So MS set out to use its position to boost its own browser instead, anti-trust followed because it was obvious MS was using its position to muscle out an independent company. For the big Tech companies now, small acquisitions are win win wins, they get the people, they get whatever was developed and they permanently avoid Microsofts Netscape situation. That being said, I'm guessing no small number of these startups were setup with the express purpose of being bought out like this.
- pjmorris 5y ago
  > For the big Tech companies now, small acquisitions are win win wins, they get the people, they get whatever was developed and they permanently avoid Microsofts Netscape situation. I have a theory that this is why MS treats its research division staff and interns so well. It reduces the amount of competitive pressure MS would face if they were all working elsewhere/on their own startups.

CarelessExpert 5y ago

> "Number of acquisitions" seems like a weird metric, without accounting for their significance (in purchase price, impact on the business, or any other real-world metric). This comment sounds like the nirvana fallacy striking again. There is no perfect metric for measuring something like overall market dominance. Thanks to a series of supreme court rulings, the traditional approach has been to look at consumer harms. But that metric alone fails to account for the way modern large conglomerates make money: not by gouging the consumer, but by dominating entire industries. So how else can you look at it? Acquisition are just another lens. Is it an imperfect lens? Yes, of course. I challenge you to find an analysis that isn't. But is it still meaningful? Yes, I absolutely think so! It is undeniably the case that these tech giants have used acquisitions as a way to protect their market position. So it absolutely makes sense to analyze their behaviour from that perspective. Furthermore, this is a news article not a whitepaper. Yes, there is an enormous amount of nuance in this kind of argument, and if you were prosecuting these guys for antitrust violations in a court of law, you'd probably do a deeper dive. > facebook buying Instagram was probably more significant than all the other acquisitions combined. How do you know that? There's simply no way to know how some of these companies would've fared because these anti-competitive practices have ensured that promising startups are smothered before they become a threat.

scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago
Alot to agree with here - how would Google have faired without being able to strategically acquire companies that made specific tech for ads and search?
piva00 5y ago
> How do you know that? There's simply no way to know how some of these companies would've fared because these anti-competitive practices have ensured that promising startups are smothered before they become a threat. Exactly, and adding to that: what about the tons of smaller companies/startups bought for a unique technology that was implemented under the hood across major products of the tech giants? We don't know about them except if some former employee leaked it, most projects will be private/secret and the public at large will never heard about the impact. Think lots of small "Doubleclick"-ish companies that were bought for a small set of features that were then transferred to major products.

ahartmetz 5y ago

It makes some sense. The more acquisitions, the higher the chance of doing well (that wording doesn't apply to price) in the metrics you mention. Especially if the perspective is extrapolating the past to the future. The thesis of the articles seems to be: Big tech will stay dominant because they will keep buying lots of companies and they will likely continue to win with some. To stop this, blah blah law changes or something (I only skimmed the article).

the_duke 5y ago

Many corporate acquisitions have the sole purpose of killing off/absorbing companies early, before they gain traction in the market and become viable competitors. Focusing on real world metrics will give a very incomplete picture of the impact acquisitions might have had on the market.

divbzero 5y ago

Yes, I would have wanted to see the graph of acquisitions weighted by purchase price but that data is hard to find for many acquisitions. Impact on business (e.g., revenue contribution) would be even better but requires subjective judgment and estimation.