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cloudwalking

Here are just a few examples:

- Keyhole (now Google Maps)

- Android Inc.

- Motorola Mobility

- GrandCentral (now Google Voice)

- NeXT

- Siri

In general, an acquired company initially became successful by bringing value to consumers. When that company is acquired, it gets more resources to bring more value to customers.

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Don't forget Translate. It actually early on was an out-of-house service, but they kept buying companies and hiring people to work on it, and it got massively better. (So a lot like Keyhole/Maps: they took something it would cost you thousands of dollars a month for (literally, for Keyhole access), made it free, and made it better.)

Also Wordly (became Google Docs)

Google Voice is effectively a dead product, isn't it? Doesn't seem that favorable to me.

I use it every single day. I wouldn't call it dead.

We'll see if Google tries to wholly replace it with hangouts. I wouldn't be mad unless it were missing features.

Dead meaning Google has put it out to pasture and will eventually kill it for good.

Dead in the sense that there has not been feature addition one for several years, yes.

That is probably best acquisition outcome. Most companies buy something good then change it until it sucks.

The best acquisition outcome is something like Android or Kinect, definitely not watching GrandCentral stagnate for years after acquisition.

Kinect was not an acquisition. MS licensed the device from PrimeSense. Apple bought the company recently.

Except for one feature that users have been screaming for, since near day one: MMS support.

And not in a hacked "if you're with TMo/Sprint, you -might- be able to get an email with the MMS in a format that's not reply-able" (and even that, only recently).

It's kept working for the last 3 years being awesome... Doesn't seem that dead to me.

Not completely. When they came out with hangout integration in gmail, I completely lost all ability to make outgoing calls for a long time.

Reader kept working until they turned it off.

Yes but it wasn't dead until they killed it.

I keep my 10 year old cell phone number alive and well on voice.google.com, it works great.

> Google Voice is effectively a dead product, isn't it?

Voice might be dead as a brand; Google's unification of communications trend might mean that the technology and functionality will eventually be merged into Hangouts.

Yes, Google Voice as a separate product is definitely going away. Its functionality will be subsumed by Hangouts, but nothing about that transition is clear to users.

Grand Central's acquisition was great for Americans and the few of us Canadians who were grandfathered in, but outside of the US (and Alberta for some reason), we lost a great service.

Keyhole became Google Earth, not Maps (they were created in-house)

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