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Comment by singer | Hacker News Reader

Why create a competing product from scratch when you can afford to buy the proven product? And don't forget about all of the existing Groupon employees you could hire.

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Because once you enter the mode of acquiring your way into new products, it's hard to shake it; it distorts the internal incentive structure.

once you enter the mode of acquiring your way into new products, it's hard to shake it

If you've been following Google, then you know they are no stranger to acquiring existing products. And as far as I can tell, their business isn't going down the tubes.

It would seem that the sales people at Groupon become less valuable as Groupon clones and Woot-type sites gain traction. As they become more popular among consumers wouldn't businesses start clamoring to get listed, negating the advantage of the skilled deal negotiators? Although every business would want to be on the largest site, which would be Groupon.

Would buying Groupon and running it independently like Zappos and Woot for Amazon somehow keep Google out of the eyes of regulators in a way starting a clone wouldn't?

What I don't understand is why Google doesn't go a layer up from this and aggregate across the many deal sites. Outside of the US, the clones are the leaders in the space. Google could work to provide search across the multiple deal providers, provide custom alerts when particular products and services become available (just imagine the value of knowing which items a person is watching to see when they go on sale!). Google Deals could be much more powerful than a single site app like Groupon.

Buying Groupon, especially at the rumored prices, is a weak move. Incidentally, I signed up for the service and unsubscribed after two days. It's of zero interest to me to have irrelevant garbage deals pushed at me, so maybe I am missing some key spam/bacn tolerance level needed to grok it.

Why indeed? Especially when the company has grown so large and sclerotic that developing new products has become a struggle against entrenched corporate bureaucracy. I'm sure it's a very tempting and logical proposition, in the short term.

>Especially when the company has grown so large and sclerotic that developing new products has become a struggle against entrenched corporate bureaucracy

Out of curiosity, what do you have to support the claim that google has become this slow-moving monolith (yes, I'm paraphrasing) other than random articles from tech media? If you have first-hand knowledge I'd love to hear it because google is still a great company to work for in my eyes and I'd like to hear the opposite view.

one way of looking at it is, ask yourself how many new products/services has Google launched this year, due to internal development? And then compare that number to their total employee count of about 22,000. Do you think if say you split off just 50% of those folks, took them and spread them out between hundreds of small little startups each with a fresh and independent entrepreneurial drive and vision, and all legacy process/culture/tradition/rules stripped away, the end result would be way way more new products and services and innovation released into the market? For me, the answer would be yes, I'd expect that. Purely on a people numbers basis, and speaking in general terms. (Of course, it would depend on lots of other factors like the nature of the individuals, etc. But you get the idea.)

A software startup only takes 1-4 decent people to get off the ground, and sometimes it doesn't take a heck of a lot more beyond that to scale it up. Now compare that to Google's 22,000. Yes lots of hard-core optimizing of hardware and software going on there, which I respect. But most of them are just polishing corners on Google's legacy products/services, and minding the store, not creating or bringing a fundamentally new and distinct product or service to the market.

Also, based on everything I've seen, I think Google hires mostly for highly academic engineering-focused types -- not entrepreneurs and not highly creative types. They mostly get those kinds only through acquisitions (or acqui-hire, as some have called it) lately, not hiring. This is my impression from afar anyway.

I'd like to echo your question.

It's crazy how quickly the meme that "google is losing it/becoming a slow giant bureaucracy" has taken hold in the recent past...

We need to institute a process to manage the memes of excessive bureaucratisation. They take hold too fast and with insufficient oversight.

I propose we form a working party to thrash out a draft proposal for such a process, to circulated to all the relevant stakeholders in due season.

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