The thing about Google money is that a dollar Google gives you is worth one dollar.
Personally, I would evaluate "Google" money based on the numbers.
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).