Hacker News Reader

Comment by Leszek | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, why not?

Acquisitions in general are often bad for the product being acquired. It often gets dismantled for the technology and re-incorporated into different products, or stagnates because the parent company's priorities are different, or just falls victim to internal politics as it becomes just one part of a larger company with many different priorities.

Google seems like a particularly bad acquirer for this as well, since they have no relevant expertise, market position, interests, etc. They don't manufacture anything, they don't sell physical products, they don't even really sell nonphysical products other than ads.

Look at what happened with Motorola Mobility, for example. Google paid a ton of money for it, basically dicked around for a couple of years with it doing nothing of note, then vomited it back up again. Thankfully Motorola Mobility was not terribly remarkable to begin with so it wasn't a big loss.

Google acquired Motorola for its patents as ammunition in a larger war. I agree it supports your main point about acquisitions in general, but I'm not sure it's indicative of what being bought by Google is like in the general case.

It seems like that is the default case for acquisitions with just about any company, and ones where more interesting stuff happens with the acquired company are not the norm.

> Look at what happened with Motorola Mobility, for example. Google paid a ton of money for it, basically dicked around for a couple of years with it doing nothing of note, then vomited it back up again.

Google fairly overtly bought it for the patent portfolio and had the plan to resell most of the rest from day one. The thing Google was buying was the patents, the rest of Motorola Mobility was packaging.

Contrast with Android, YouTube, or anything else where Google wasn't buying patents or doing an acquihire, but actually buying a company for a product.

(Google probably looks worse in some respect for products because it has the kind of reserves that let it spend money for big acquisitions when all it wants is an acquihire or some resource like Motorola's patent portfolio and doesn't have any plan or concern for the main product, but I think that's an indication that it is bad when it actually is buying for product.)

> they have no relevant ... interests

I don't know how big a deal the self-driving cars thing is at Google, but a giant car/battery company sounds pretty complementary to that.

They're both related to cars, but I don't think they're that complementary. Google's self-driving car project is a moonshot R&D thing that just piles on a ton of computers and sensors to an existing car. It's pretty much unrelated with designing and producing the actual car. To the extent that they would go together, presumably so they could build an integrated self-driving car from the ground up, it fits in to my worries: rather than continue to improve and sell the Model S, the acquisition would tie into another project with a significantly different goal in mind.

> Look at what happened with Motorola Mobility, for example. Google paid a ton of money for it, basically dicked around for a couple of years with it doing nothing of note, then vomited it back up again

Motorola went from phones I would advise everyone to avoid to phones I actually advised family members to purchase in that time. They're basically the low cost nexus at this point.

I'm pretty sure it has been seen before that Google or another big tech company buys a smaller up-and-comming company/great idea, and it is never heard from again.

Well, Google has fairly much experience in the automobile sector with their self-driving cars.

Shit, a self-driving Tesla, now that is a car worth saving every penny for...

Tesla's upcoming autopilot feature is part of the way there. Only a matter of time.

In the context of self-driving cars, autopilot is in the category of "we're 90% done, only 90% to go!" Except much worse than that, because that implies you're about halfway there, and autopilot is maybe 10% of the way towards full self-driving.

Don't get me wrong, autopilot is super cool and really useful. The autopilot features that are currently enabled in my Model S are wonderful, and I can't wait until they're all there. But they won't be even close to full self-driving. All it will do is maintain speed intelligently based on the car in front of you, automatically stay in your lane, and switch lanes on command. It won't switch lanes on its own, it won't stop at stoplights, it won't make turns for you, or do any of the hundred other really difficult (for computers) things that are part of everyday driving.

Sibling: Google has made a prototype that drives on a virtual track. That's far away from manufacturing a car, let alone a self-driving one.

Relevant: http://www.asymco.com/2015/02/23/the-entrants-guide-to-the-a...

> I'm pretty sure it has been seen before that Google or another big tech company buys a smaller up-and-comming company/great idea, and it is never heard from again.

I'm pretty sure the opposite has also been seen [0]; what's the basis for concluding a Google acquisition would have put Tesla closer to the "never heard from again" side?

[0] Google's acquisition of Android, for instance.

Haven't you heard what happened to Google Reader? If Google can't even keep small projects with no revenue stream going then how can we trust them with much harder projects for which they will have invested billions of dollars? They'd probably buy Tesla then shut it down immediately. Even if they didn't shut it down Google is an ad company which means it is incapable of deriving profit from anything but advertisements. Google Tesla of today may have been nothing more than a company that sells in-home battery backup for AdWords.

It's hard to tell if I flew too close to Poe's law, failed at sarcasm, have an minority opinion, or just wasn't contributing to the conversation. Probably a combination.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com