

Google Executive: No Time to Build, So We Buy - bakbak
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/google-executive-no-time-to-build-so-we-buy/?ref=technology

======
tptacek
You wonder when the first time an executive at Cisco said this. 10-15 years
later, the company seems almost incapable of building _anything_ , except for
new Cisco-looking bezels for the products they've acquired. If you're an
engineer at Cisco and you get an MRD --- not even for a new product, but
simply for version 3.0 of something already shipping --- the rational move to
make is to go start a company to build it. After all, even if you kick ass and
kill yourself to built it internally, they'll still buy someone else; after
all, "someone else" comes with customers attached already.

Then again, who's to say that's a bad thing? Cisco steamrolls over its
competition; entrepreneurial devs get multiple bites at a $5-$25MM apple; new
products get shipped. I'm not being sarcastic: the strategy works.

Takes a bit of the fun out of it for Googlers, though.

~~~
m0nastic
10 years ago I was out drinking at a bar in Santa Cruz with a marketing rep
for Cisco who asked us what our thoughts were about the company as regards to
other technology companies.

I told her that I didn't really think of Cisco as a technology company, but as
an acquisition company; which she was really surprised to hear.

Even then it was pretty apparent that they weren't doing very much in-house
(and it's gotten even worse since then).

Which is sort of a shame, as back in my network engineer days I dreamed about
working there on IOS.

~~~
tptacek
I know people who washed into Cisco in acquisitions who _multiple times_ left
to start companies marketing remarkably specific and incremental improvements
to existing Cisco products; almost as bad as, "here's the company I started to
provide _this specific report_ for the Cisco 4371GX†". I'm not kidding about
the MRD thing; if you're an entrepreneur and a developer, I think they might
be tradeable information.

I've never worked at Cisco and I have no negative opinions of them or their
products. Like I said, the strategy seems to work.

I just wonder whether Google's culture is ready for the terminus of this
slippery slope.

Remember what they used to say about Microsoft in the late '90s? How it wasn't
a good idea to make fun of their 1.0 products, because the one thing they were
going to be good at was refining them and refining them and refining them
until they took over the market? Who still does that anymore?

† _Made up_

~~~
RyanMcGreal
>I know people who washed into Cisco in acquisitions who multiple times left
to start companies marketing remarkably specific and incremental improvements
to existing Cisco products

When you put it that way, it actually sounds like a wonderful (for Cisco) way
to outsource the risk of innovation by offering to pay a premium for good
ideas that are well executed.

~~~
tptacek
It probably is. But it's probably not compatible with the engineering culture
at Google.

------
martythemaniak
It's kinda hard to talk about all acquisitions equally. Take Android for
example: founded in 2003, acquired in by Google in 2005 and launched in 2008
(launched widely in 2009). I would call it both a successful acquisition and a
successful Google product.

Groupon, OTOH, seemed like a wholly different thing - they already had a big
name, lots of customers and independent identity. Seems like google wanted to
buy them to move into a whole new area, rather than building them slowly into
the company like Maps, Android, Docs etc

------
brown9-2
It seems too easy to interpret these statements to mean that Google would
rather buy a company than build a new product.

From reading the actual quotes, seems like the executive was speaking very
specifically about entering into a whole new line of business like acquiring
Groupon would have represented.

