Google’s Purchase of Tonic Systems
So here’s something I can’t quite figure out. Google has thousands of smart software engineers, each of whom has 20% time (1 day a week to work on their own cool project), yet out of the three Google Apps (aka Google’s Microsoft Office Killer), only one (the spreadsheet) was created internally. The word processor is Writely (purchased from Upstartle in 2006) and the presentation program will be the just-purchased JavaPoint from Tonic Systems.
What does this say about Google’s ability to write web applications? Or other software? Let’s go down the list:
- Google Desktop: internally developed (as far as I know)
- Google Toolbar: internally developed
- GWT: purchased from a company in Atlanta in 2006
- Google Wiki: recently purchased from JotSpot (has yet to become a Google "product")
- Google Docs: aka Writely, purchased from Upstartle
- Google Spreadsheets: internally developed
- Google Presentation: there was "Presently", but that appears to be dead with the purchase of JavaPoint from Tonic Systems.
- GMail: internally developed
- Dodgeball: purchased and killed (or at least left to starve), and founders left Google
- Google Radio Ads: purchased from dMarc in 2005, but dMarc founders left Google
- Picasa: purchased in 2004
- Google Earth: purchased from Keyhole in 2004
- Google SketchUp: purchased in 2006
- Google Analytics: purchased from Urchin in 2005
- Google AdSense: purchased from Applied Semantics in 2003
I could probably go on, but you get the picture. It seems to me that Google is very good at purchasing technologies and (sometimes) applying the Google brand to make them popular (or at least more popular). However, Google is not so good about developing products internally and sometimes has trouble keeping the original teams as part of Google.
