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0 pointskybernetikos2y ago0 comments

That's interesting, but I don't think it diminishes the point - a two person company would have been pretty unlikely to acquire them, or stay two person if it did and needed to integrate them with their search product.

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crabmusket2y ago

Agreed, but why should we care whether Google was able to acquire service X or Y?

(It's one of my pet peeves when people elide the massive amount of innovation that happens in small companies which then gets conglomerated under one of 5 massive brands.)

I'd argue that Google's one major innovation is the ad-supported free business model for most of these services. From a casual skim, it looks like most of the revenue for the company that built what became Earth was from the military. Google took that and made it "free" for regular people.

kybernetikosOP2y ago

I chose those because I think maps and street view and to a lesser extent earth are meaningful improvements to the Google search experience that wouldn't have been available to a smaller company.

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