Predicting what Google may do in 2008 is about as accurate as predicting the future using a Magic 8 ball; you can make educated guesses but it’s nothing more than that. There are two certainties however; Google will acquire many companies and they will also launch a range of new products and upgrades to existing products. Here’s a few companies that Google may look at in 2008.
Amazon
The idea of a merged Google + Amazon into a new company Googlezon is an old idea. However Amazon keeps moving into spaces that Google would naturally be a candidate to be in.
Last week Amazon added SimpleDB to its suite of cloud-based IT infrastructure, which also includes storage (S3) and computation (EC2). They are appealing products, and S3 in particular has built a strong client base that as changed the dynamics of online storage. This is a space that Google would logically want to be in. Google is already offering paid online corporate service through Google Apps and they have the infrastructure to offer similar services to Amazon.
Of course the ecommerce side of Amazon is the cream on top. Google has been desperately trying to break into ecommerce with Google Checkout. Google recommending Amazon products via search would be a huge winner.
Rating: Emulate
Amazon’s $37 billion market cap puts it out of range for a Google cash acquisition, although a combination cash/ script offer is not beyond the realms of possibility. Google needs new revenue streams to keep up their continuing high growth rates in 2008, enterprise level hosting and service provision would seem a no brainer for Google, presuming they can get the tech/ implementation right.
SixApart
SixApart has undergone a major refocus this year into what is now primarily a enterprise provider of blogging tools. The mostly free LiveJournal, a competitor to Blogger has been sold, and Movable Type has been open sourced, in part taking away the baggage of running (what was previously) a mostly free to use blogging platform. TypePad offers a serious blogging platform that companies are willing to pay for, something Google doesn’t currently have. Given Google’s push into paid enterprise platform provision TypePad would slot in nicely as an additional feature offered by Google. The stray in the SixApart package is Vox; it doesn’t seem like a natural fit for Google but it can easily be offloaded. A service such as TypeKey would fit nicely into Google’s Profile/ one login everywhere push.
Rating: possible buy
The alternative is Automattic, however WordPress.com competes primarily with Blogger, Akismet could be easily emulated and there’s not a lot of enterprise focused product on offer. There’s every chance that buyers will be circling SixApart in 2008, particularly as the original investors start looking for a buyout as the company hits 4+ years since its initial funding. Google seems like a natural fit, and they would easily be able to afford the maybe mid $xxx million figure.
Ning
The white label social network provider Ning is leading in its space, and of all the companies in this post, Ning is the most perfect fit for Google. As we saw with the announcement of Google Knol, Google is all about facilitating the creative desires of users, as does Ning. Google already offers its own free web hosting with Pages and blogs with Blogger, social networking sites fills the list out nicely. Ning would also mean that Google wouldn’t acquire a company that seriously competes with most of its partners in Open Social; instead of being a major social network owner, Google would simply become the biggest provider of social networks.
Rating: buy
Someone will buy Ning in 2008, Google would be the perfect buyer.
Reuters
Google faces another battle this year with rights holders over news, a battle they could in part lose. Even now media outlets worldwide are trying to find ways of blocking Google from indexing their content. Reuters is one of the worlds top two providers of syndicated news and is profitable. Google wants what Reuters has.
Rating: very long shot buy
AP is owned by the newspapers and will never sell, Reuters is listed making it a possible acquisition target. Google is moving away from simply being the company that indexes the world to being the company that also offers content to the world as well. A Google controlled Reuters would radically change the face of news gathering world wide. Not only would Google have first rights to most of the news worldwide, it could also leverage that control in forming partnerships with media outlets, partnerships that challenge AP and the established order. The possibilities for Google would be great: discounted Reuters news in return for running Google ads or for being indexed by Google, Google offering to host news sites at no cost as part of a content deal, allowing Google to know who was reading what and when. Reuters video and similar visual products would feed into YouTube and Google images. Very much a long shot but an appealing one. Maybe a small stake might be more likely for Google? Either way, Google wants news content from somewhere and I’d bet they’d be willing to pay for it if the deal was right.
If you have any acquisition targets for Google you’d like to share, leave a comment.
Pizza Hut!!
Along the lines of Reuters, PR Newswire would be a perfect acquisition for Google in 2008. The company news distributor is a cash cow. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th largest newswires were all purchased in the last year or so (BusinessWire by Berkshire Hathaway, Marketwire by CCN mathews, PrimeNewswire by NASDAQ).
SixApart: they don’t need to buy them. They’d gain no new technology. Blogger is just as good as their MT and since MT is open source, they gain nothing by purchasing them.
Ning: Ning’s written in PHP and Google would have to rewrite it to run it on their platform. It would take them less time to write it from scratch than to rework Ning. Ning also doesn’t have huge audience and took in over $40M in VC money which means that they’re way too expensive. In short, no buy.
Reuters: what?!? Do you even know who owns Reuters? Thomson (a giant Canadian corporation) bough them for like $15B+. Do you think Google would wanna buy them for $20B+?
IMHO, there are better, cheaper buys and Google will continue buying startups, not these big corps.
Google will launch their GDrive, emulating our YDrive.
Google will buy http://Loomia.com
Google will emulate http://SalesForce.com
Many startups in China. We predict Google will buy us, who being Wojai, who emulates Jaiku, who emulates Twitter.
Google should buy the leading companies of every sector.
Techcrunch
salesforce
linkedin
Zoomr
dash
they’ll continue emulating Microsoft like they’ve been doing for a while…this means copying them, facebook, apple, Ford, Joe’s corner store, Verizon, Lucy’s lemonade stand and GE
mikebee
Reuters is still listed though, makes it a much easier starting point for an acquisition than AP who you wouldn’t even get to first base with.
AnIdea (#2)
PRNewsWire makes some sense.
Ning has no incentive to sell itself. Andreessen is not looking for a few quick google millions–he has plenty of that already.
Yahoo – they should buy yahoo! – Helllllloooooo! add 23 points to search market share, get a ton of content, and monetize search better by a margin of 4 to 1, its a no brainer. Plus, its cheap as hell. Buy Amazon the year after, when the charges from the Kindle fiasco take the stock back to the 20s.
I would bet on Microsoft and Yahoo!
“which means that they’re way too expensive.”
Heh. Aren’t we talking about Google?
I think Remember the Milk will be bought, and added to Google calendar.
On the smaller acquisition front, Google buys OpenDNS. Drops in nicely to the apps suite, follows the path of Postini, GrandCentral, and FeedBurner as a smart intermediary service. A natural way to drive search and ad traffic, though critics will cry foul that Google is in effect reincarnating Verisign’s wildcard DNS service.
Here’s my guesses:
Mint
Zoho
LinkedIn
37Signals
TiVo
Salesforce.com
Don’t forget the news of them possibly buying whatsopen.com! Didn’t you run an article on it??
Confluence
Salesforce
For consumer focused services they have all the talent they need, only purchases that give them user numbers would be interesting. They dont seem to buy strong brand names.
they will definitely buy a cellular phone company somewhere
Twitter
Jaiku has been bought by Google already.
Wojai is interesting name for Chinese user, where’s your site? Have you heard of fanfou.com?
Duncan, please, I am sick of your Google stories, no more please!
zombo.com
you know, one glance at the post and I can tell its by Duncan!
just saying, nothing personal..
They have been copying MSN for years, this pattern is unlikely to cease!
fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Thanks for the speculation. I think nothing is better than Google speculation, such as:
http://schlerpl...ser_and_go.html
With so many billions, I think Google will mainly snatch up dozens of $10M or so deals – just to make sure they continue to bring in bright engineers and potentially useful tools. In fact, 3-dozen $10M deals amounts to “just $360M”.
Let’s not forget about the mobile spectrum bid and that GOOG could put a billion or more into new data centers.
Never really thought about GOOG-AMZN. To me, the Epic2014 video (http://robinsloan.com/epic/) was more slick graphics than a real idea. For such a high price tag, AMZN doesn’t really fit into Google’s strategy of organizing the world’s info (and communications) quite like mobile.
SixApart isn’t growing fast enough to warrant consideration. Ning, na.
Hey, what about Yahoo?
I’m putting all of my chips on Yelp.
You have it backwards. Ning has some interesting technology, but Six Apart is washed up and has scaling problems on Typepad to this day, they even had downtime last Thursday. Akismet comes up in a lot of meetings at Google. If it was easy to emulate they would have already, and Blogspot would be spam-free. You seem to forget that Google is already competing with its OpenSocial partners with Orkut, the #10 website in the world according to Alexa.
What if Google buys Skype from eBay? I think that is very possible given Google’s mobile ambitions.
Buy Ubuntu Linux
probably Ebay itself….. or a merger. I see more positives as it needs all three – ebay, paypal and skype in one shot, where google has shoddy products as competition. Google then focus on core competency of innovation
@lee, thanks..
Highly unlikely Google will buy Twitter (else, should’ve been already).. either Twitter didn’t want to sell to Google or Google didn’t offer a price the Twitter investors couldn’t refuse.
Jaiku, while already a Google property, sounds terrible for the Chinese users.. it strongsly rhymes with “am-crying” in Mandarin.
Wojai (rhymes with “i-am / i-am-doing”) is our natural answer to Twitter’s theme around “what are you donig?” for the Chinese users. Site is coming soon in 2008. (Aren’t we talking about 2008?) Yes we are aware that if one day Google buys us, if ever, it would neither be a technology buy (tech so simple) nor a name buy (we are not g.cn by name), but a community buy; thus, to have a good/easy/natural name is important to amass Chinese users.
Fanfou certainly heard of them, but am clueless.. it’s certainly creative.. “rice? no?” (probably mean, “want to go eat? no?”) probably name came from the myrice.com site or something.. well, we’re also aware that sometimes Google buy strange things anyways..
I think google would be higher the gmail capacity
What a badly conceived, speculative and useless article.
No individual is allowed to hold more than 15% of Reuters. A number of companies already hold the maximum (eg. News Corporation).
i vote for weebly.com. g needs this
I can’t believe you left out the one big buyout that makes sense: EBAY.
Google would never buy out amazon since it has no desire to own stores and warehouses, but ebay is much closer aligned to what google is and wants to accomplish, plus they’ll get paypal to boot. This also would be good for ebay and ebay users since google could add some of their magic to do a major overhaul on the crappy site.
Twitter. Ebay might sell Skype to Google. Google and Apple are up to something with the spectrum bid. Ning does make some sense the more I think about it as it’s a social network platform.
One of the leading Semantic Web companies … and I’ll leave it at that.
@Bubblehead
Why would they buy their largest advertiser? Wouldn’t this simply drive down reportable revenue and raise questions about bias in keyword advertising?
Google are launching Google TV Ads (see it on youtube) they need TV ads produced in a BIG way. Spot Runner is the most logical fit.
You want a genius takeover for Google? it’s right under their nose…..
.
.
.
.
INTUIT
1. Google would get an established merchant card processing business PLUS a platform to tie the Google Checkout product to. Without a platform (i.e. Ebay for Paypal), Checkout won’t get the traction it needs.
2. Google gets Quicken/Quickbooks which they can then use to bring that data online and tie into Google Finance, etc…. with some nice UI attached to it, Mint would likely be looking for its paddle.
3) Intuit is right across the street, highly profitable, and stable and will likely see uptick in growth as economy heads south and everybody tries to organize their finances.
Huge avenue for ad revs once products are brought online (they are already to a certain extent but piss poor job)
4) Google gets what Microsoft could not
5) Intuit is highly profitable and stable
$700M in cash flow for $10B….and an opportunity to unleash a beast….
Marzipan
quoungo@yahoo.com
Duncan:
Are you not aware that Reuters already has a buyer/ (Thomson).
Here is one link to that:
http://www.reut...553044220070515
Note, it’s from reuters.com, but found via Google.
Google seems trying to one of the biggest provider for social network.
Salesforce.com + Google Adwords is the real solution for the small and medium bussines. The names is GoogleForce… Check it!
I hope that Amazon will amplify their share in the web services area.
Also I hope that the search results from Ask will be more accurate because they have a very good user interface interaction.
For the new year I wish that a global price strategy will be accepted and implemented by major software developers: ADOBE
Canada. Google should buy Canada (yes the country) and use it as a test bed for a seamless web-data centric gadget utopia. Canada can’t be worth more than amazon can it???
Long Live G-anada!!!!!
Regarding Google losing ebay as an adwords buyer — it doesn’t matter. If google owned ebay, they could integrate ebay results better in universal search and ultimately drive more fee revenue to ebay to more than make up for the adwords lost. Plus, their ebay division would no longer need to spend money on adwords making the buyout that much more profitable.
Perhaps one of the big credit rating agencies or related companies.
See this Robert Cringely article: Getting to Know You: Think you have a secret life? Think again.
http://www.pbs....109_003391.html
If you look at the acquisitions done between 2001 and 2007, the billions deals, like the 5% share in AOL and YouTube, and the popular ones like Picassa and Feedburner and so on. These guys really know what they are doing and who they are buying. The strategic answer would be: taking over the biggest share in Online Advertising / Digital Marketing, can you imagine only the amount of ads served worldwide accross multiple digital mediums through DoubleClick? Their sensible targets should be Technorati, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Last.fm, Monster, Answers.com. These sites can help then gain control of huge disciplines in the web industry.
Parul
http://www.bhopu.com
Nobody has mentioned this I think, but what’s to stop Google in going for the recruitment market dollars? I see them buying SimplyHired or a similar service in 2008.