| Google is a great example too. Many of Google’s best-known hits began outside of Google: * Maps (maps from Where2 Technologies, acquired in 2004; real-time traffic from ZipDash, acquired in 2004; satellite imagery from Keyhole, acquired in 2005) * Android (founded in 2003, bought for $50M+ in 2005) * YouTube (founded in 2005, bought for $1.7B in 2006) * Adsense (Google acquired Applied Semantics in 2003,
DoubleClick in 2007, and AdMob for mobile ads in 2009) * Google Docs (spreadsheets by 2Web, acquired in 2005; docs by Upstartle, acquired in 2006; slides by Tonic Systems, acquired in 2007) * Waymo (Thrun's team, 510 Systems) A long list of Alphabet's acquisitions are on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... |
Interestingly enough, IBM has even left https://www.compose.com/ as a standalone entity for now.