I'm assuming Google doesn't need any of the company's business, and that it is being acquired for its talent.
I wouldn't assume that. Developer-friendly natural language APIs will only become more important over the next few years.
I wouldn't assume that. Developer-friendly natural language APIs will only become more important over the next few years.
Edit: I should add Firebase could have(and should have) been the next PHP/Access. Could have solved almost every SMB business custom software need in a way that a business could go from front-end to front-end and never get locked into another 1,000 crud app for XYZ vertical. Could have wiped it all out. Firebase could have become the data store of the internet. Then Google showed up....
Given that Firebase seems to have become the foundation of Google's mobile app development offering I'm guessing ... pretty well?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
However, for some applications there's a vendor with a neural network (or whatever) trained on a billion inputs, you see it perform better than the open source equivalent trained on a million inputs, and you don't have a billion inputs to improve the open source version with.