If you have any chance of making it on your own, I'd turn down Google money in an instant after reading this.
Personally, I would evaluate "Google" money based on the numbers.
Founders are supposed to take into consideration their product's role after acquisition when they're talking about getting bought out?
This isn't rocket science - once you sell your company to Google (or whomever), you don't own it anymore. That's why you get all those shiny coins.
Also, there are successes. Writely - > Google Docs seemed to be a pretty big success. I'm sure there are others.
The thing is that we tend to forget the successes a little bit because they got to merge so well with Google. Looking at the list of acquisitions on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_acquisitions), I can only think about Blogger but I have no experience on if it changed for the best. As far as I can tell, it looks like it's still working fine.
And just to show you that technical issues are not the primary problem, they were using Windows/C# but managed to port to Google's Linux/Java-based infrastructure and login system very quickly. (Granted, C# is way closer to Java than PHP).
I missed where exactly the article said this. I imagine if you're looking at a Google acquisition and you care about your service, nobody is stopping you from asking "how will this integrate into Google's MapReduce/BigTable? Where will I be in the Google corp. structure? Will I get engineers working with me on my product, or will I be farmed off to other products?" Weigh the answers to this as part of yoru consideration about whether this acquisition is good or not.
I think the founders are more to blame for not understanding what an acquisition by Google involved, not whoever@Google they were dealing with for not spoon-feeding them.
Closing your doors to new signups is practically like suicide. As a founder I would never agree to that if I was taking a smaller buyout in exchange for continuing to work on my application as an employee of Goog.
Now if they backed up the money dump truck and sent me on my way I wouldn't care so much (although I'd probably have thousands of users who'd hate me but probably also wouldn't blame me)