Luck

or Using Money to Make Money

The Best Acquisitions of all Time.

 

 

I've maintained since the long gone "Don't be Evil" days that Google was basically lucky. 

They hit at just the right moment in the dotcom bubble to turn a decent but not world-changing product into mountains of cash that they then used to buy up the other new tech that eventually made them what they are today.

The initial Google search was good but not that much better than the others at the time. I remember running tests of Google vs other search engines to get answers I needed and there just wasn't much difference in the results.

What was different was that it was clean and didn't confuse users on its purpose. A simple white page with a simple search box and the Google colors.  

It was for search ... not a portal.

It had a buzz with users but so did about a million other dotcoms. Still, Google was a cool name and was for search only.  People took it seriously and used it.

Eventually they figured out a way to make money with ads. This gave them a way to make money. 

Everyone threw money at them.

Flush with dotcom cash that others wasted on things like super bowl commercials, Google started buying up the businesses that would make it what it is today. (minus the Don't be Evil part)

If their timing had been off buy a year or two, the Google tech may have been bought buy another company or simply never found traction in the search market.

A good but not great product made great by the luck of good timing and using new found riches to build a suite of good products by acquisition.

They owe much of their current existence to financial management rather than tech.