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There is one case: Google acquired Keyhole (Google Earth), John Hanke then built Ingress/Niantic which is a spunoff company (where Google afaik still holds some
by johannes1234321 4y ago
There is one case: Google acquired Keyhole (Google Earth), John Hanke then built Ingress/Niantic which is a spunoff company (where Google afaik still holds some shares) doing quite well with PokemonGo it seems (while they had to stop their Catan project and killed off their Harry Potter game)
- jsnell 4y agoA couple of others: Boston Dynamics. Motorola.
- johannes1234321 4y agoBoston Dynamics was never integrated into Google, so I guess relatively easy to split of. Motorola is interesting, but considering it was less than a year in Google and more focussed on hardware development probably also not fully integrated and one could argue whether Google acquired it only for the patents they kept when selling to Lenovo. John Hanke in contrast built Maps and related things after being acquired and only after a few years moved to build Niantic, where at least Ingress was developed fully inside Google (but apparently not fully in Google stack, but so that they could transition to Google Cloud) But yeah, good examples!
- jpadkins 4y agomotorola was patents ($8B in protection IIRC) + key talent acquisition (called ATG at the time). I don't think Google ever wanted the bulk of motorola's operations or rf engineering. They bought it, stripped out the things they wanted to keep, then spun it back out.
- fomine3 4y agoGoogle acquired HTC mobile development team to develop Pixel, after they sold Motorola. It's weird.