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Comment by StillBored | Hacker News Reader

What I don't understand is why google didn't bid on Time Warner.

With very little effort (compared with rolling out fiber in a couple cities) they could have completed the rollout of DOCSIS 3, and provided everyone with 343/143 Mbps using modems available today (zoom 5341j) and in a couple years when the 24 channel modems become more wide spread upgrade everyone to Gigabit operations.

In ten years will google fiber have cost them more than $45 billion? Will they have 1/10th the penetration that TW has today?

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Speculative, but culture?

Look at how the Motorola acquisition played out. Motorola was a company that had a pretty damn good (maybe just a bit heavy) engineering culture.

If you buy out a culturally bankrupt company infested with assholes, you have to root out all those assholes while simultaneously continuing operations and developing the future. I dare say this would be much harder than a new build out.

Also speculative, but Google probably has a set of equipments that don't work well with others. When you play in the access and transport space, there usually a set of standard that you have to follow, in order for it to work together with others.

If Google owns the entire infrastructure, they can build their own equipments that are a lot simpler/cheaper to build, because they don't have to deal with all the standard-crap that other manufacturers have to deal with.

If they bought TWC, then they need to integrate all those devices, including all of the OSSes that are guarded by bureaucrats.

Yeah, they probably learned that the hard way from their DoubleClick acquisition.

I wouldn't buy Time Warner Cable for $45 billion solely on the fact that they're in a declining business (traditional cable tv) that is likely to lose millions of subscribers over the next decade (so I'm paying 23 times earnings for the NY Times in 2003 basically). I also wouldn't buy them for $45 billion because they're carrying a massively borked balance sheet, at $23b in long term debt and -$22.3b in net tangibles. The true cost of buying them is a lot higher than $45 billion.

I work for a company that was cobbled together from a bunch of smaller companies. It's a huge pain in the ass. Different technologies, different billing systems, different corporate cultures... you'd have to get an absolute fire sale price to make that worthwhile.

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