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Comment by _countzero_ | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a silly and ridiculous acquisition. Surely for $32 billion almost any security technology could be replicated? You could hire several thousand best in class engineers and build whatever Wiz has in house… buying this almost makes it seem like Google has no idea how to build new innovative products, which I guess a lot of people already think.

For Instagram and WhatsApp it was the user base and growth that was being bought, which is much harder to acquire than some random B2B saas security software.

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For $32B Google are buying Wiz's brand, existing customers and their pipeline of customers, along with the technology.

This is the answer, Wiz already has a foot in the door / running contracts with huge cloud consumers, but not all of them are using Google's cloud. I wonder if Google tries to earn more money off of competing cloud platforms by offering services like this.

Wiz has no brand, no one knows who they are.

Revenue from Wiz's customers will not make back $32 billion dollars even in 30 years.

Wiz's technology is irrelevant. I think Google already scans for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. And can build similar for low millions of dollars.

Plenty of people know who they are and have for quite a while.

A few years is not quite a while.

The issue is a lot of customers are going to run away from Wiz now, due to all the Google uncertainty.

If they want the customers, they should have to compete for them. Google shouldn't be allowed to acquire any companies. They're already huge.

> You could hire several thousand best in class engineers

How easy is this? Especially if you're doing it on an accelerated timeline, it seems like you'd have to pay above market to poach thousands of best-in-class engineers, and then you're stuck with higher salary expenses forever.

Google already employs some of the best software engineers in the world. In fact they’ve been laying off thousands of them. Google, like most big companies struggles to innovate because succeeding at a big company and making something fresh and new are different and often mutually exclusive skills. If they could have built it themselves they would have.

> In fact they’ve been laying off thousands of them

Citation please? Last layoff at Google of any significance was over 2 years ago in the post-pandemic cleanup era..

Apparently they tried to acquire Wiz last year already, which means they've been thinking about it probably since before they let all those engineers go.

There is actually some drama between Wiz and Orca, a company founded one year before Wiz. Orca alleged Wiz copied them, and Orca does operate in the same space. But a lot of hundred billion dollar companies are built on moats, integration and switching costs.

Yeah but Google is a trillion dollar company. Why do they need to spend $32billion on a company whose only value add seems to be they are good at finding exploits? You could hire every cyber security researcher in the country for $32billion.

It is a difficult question to answer. For example, why did Google acquire YouTube in the early 2010s? A platform technically and engineering wise similar to YouTube would have been very easy to replicate. IMO the best explanation goes back all the way to the days of Standard Oil/Carnegie Steel company - and quite possibly even the East India Company. There's an enormous benefit to consolidate various businesses under you and create a monopoly. Today in tech, monopolies are far from being as straightforward as being the dominant producer of a commodity like oil or steel. But there's undoubtedly some similar mechanisms involved. Synergy is one way to put it, but I think it's too restrictive.

I think the other part of the equation missing is if Google did create their own Wiz, Wiz would still be on the market, and it'd be a bitter fight which they could very well lose.

Google did in fact have a product that was technically similar and in fact superior to YouTube. Remember Google Video? It was better and people hated it.

What Wiz/Orca did is easy to copy for any Cloud security company with enough money, there's no moat.

What is hard about that is actually selling your product to customers, which Wiz managed to do in a way never seen before.

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