Is it worth being acquired by Google?

By Aditya Mhatre at 22 January, 2008, 4:25 am

For an entrepreneur or any businessman, it’s always a pleasure when a big company shows interest in acquiring your business. Besides the money, I think it’s the incredible high that one gets of having created something that is so valuable that a big company wants to buy it. When I told one of the directors where I worked earlier that I am quitting to start my business, he said to me - “Always take the money”.� The thing that prompted me to write this is in connection with the several problems that Jaiku, a hugely popular service that google purchased a few months back, has been facing

It has been reported by Ars Technica that google has neglected the service so much that there has been an exodus of users to Twitter. This is not the first time that google has done this to a budding start-up. A few of us might remember a service called Dodgeball which was purchased by google and then thrown in the dumps. The founders of dodgeball were so frustrated by the lack of engineering resources provided to them that they publicly resigned from google via their blogs. So why would a company spend millions to buy a company and then neglect it? Om Malik of GigaOM nicely put it - “Google’s Money is good, but working for google, not so good”.

In Jaiku’s case, Jyri Engestrom,� the founder of Jaiku is quiet an authority on how web presence should be done right. It is also public information that Larry & Sergey like to hang out with smart people and I guess the only way to get Jyri to hang out with them was to buy his company and that’s what they did! So while Jaiku is starving for resources, I am sure that Jyri is having enough resources to keep him happy. But Google is not the only company that does this. Microsoft championed the process of acquiring a healthy, money-making company and turning its product/services into a stinking mess. A company that surprisingly has managed to make good of all its purchases is Adobe. Right from the homesite acquisition to the Macromedia acquisition. The difference being the spirit of the buy out. Adobe buys companies for its products where as Google in the above case bought the companies for the talented and visionary founders but at the cost of the founder’s company .

Here is another story of a google acqusition gone wrong.�

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Categories : Technology