[stevoo]

I disagree here. It made me wonder how much more Tesla could have been with Googles power. As the article states, Elon Musk would keep on working on his project for 8 years with extra funding to create the same cars he is now.

If that was the case and with Googles money and power, they might had a better chance of creating a better car as well as adding self driving in the car much faster if we look at google car. ( offcourse that is still years away )

[freyr]

Tesla's goal seems to be making the best electric car they can possibly make, and it shows in their results. We can never know for sure whether Google would have interfered with that goal or diluted their focus, but that's how acquisition stories often turn out.

Funnily enough, having loads of cash doesn't always result in a better product. The awful products that cash-rich companies have churned out in the past decade are too numerous to mention (including several examples from Google).

Also, it's not obvious that a software company can build a great car, or a car company can build great software. User-facing car software has been uniformly awful. Google's self-driving car prototypes, while cute (in the so-ugly-its-cute way), aren't particularly inspiring as automobiles. This separation of concerns lets both companies focus on their strengths (which can be combined down the road, as long as the self-driving technology becomes licensable). Although I imagine Tesla will still build its own self-driving technology, and Google will build more buggies. But even that's preferable to acquisition, because it allows cross-pollination of ideas from two separate entities.

[Crito]

> "We can never know for sure whether Google would have interfered with that goal or diluted their focus, but that's how acquisition stories often turn out."

There would be a short production run of small cars with cheerful color schemes (not dissimilar from Car2Go styled smartcars) sold as "development" units. Car journalists would have a difficult time getting their hands on them, but google woud ensure that SF tech bloggers would get them. These cars would stand out in public in all of the wrong ways, and soon anyone driving one would be labeled a techie asshole. Future revisions would never materialize.

[seanp2k2]

Well, considering Google would have done the Model S release with 500 units (as part of an "EV explorers" program), then stopped updating the software, waited 9 months with no news whole competitors built competitive products, then wrote it off as a loss and announced that they're deprecating the product in favor of their new line of RC cars, I think it's good that they haven't sold.

TL;DR name one company Google acquired where they didn't kill that company's awesome product within a couple years, regardless of how awesome / market-leading / profitable it was.

[magicalist]

Just going off the ones I recognize from this list[1], older than "a couple years" but since, say, 2009: On2, reCAPTCHA, AdMob, ITA, Widevine, Motorola (though arguably it had no awesome product to maintain), Waze.

But more than half the companies in that range I don't recognize, so maybe their product is still around (or is fully functional, but only within Google Docs or something).

You're also ignoring the fact that many acquisitions wouldn't have survived without being acquired and their products would have shut down (or "pivoted" until they were unrecognizable). Tesla obviously wasn't in that category, but that actually makes it harder to compare to historical data, as few companies really parallel it well.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...

[mikeash]

Waze is a great example. They've basically gone full-on vampire on that one, sucking out all the delicious (user-generated!) data and presumably headed for leaving Waze itself as a desiccated husk.

[magicalist]

A great example of what? It hasn't been quite two years (June 11, 2013), but it's still around.

Presumably you mean if it's shut down it will be a great example, but right now it's actually a great example of the opposite: improving the products of the acquiring company while keeping the acquired product going. You could put up more walls between the two, but at some point that becomes just investing, not acquisition.

[mikeash]

I think it's a great example right now. I don't see any benefits from the Google acquisition, and the product is slowly stagnating. The iOS app doesn't even have native iPhone 6+ support yet! Meanwhile Google is making great use of Waze data in Google Maps. The current state of things is great if you're a Maps user, less great if you're a Waze user, and I don't see any indication that's going to change.

Put the Waze acquisition onto Tesla. Google buys Tesla just as the Model S is coming out, and starts using the technology to benefit their own products. Which products it would benefit I'm not sure, but maybe they improve the batteries for Android phones, or start using the Model S as the testbed for their self-driving cars, or something. Meanwhile the Model S stays as it was in 2013, with some minor improvements. This would be a terrible outcome!

[magicalist]

Waze does need to update for the iPhone 6 even (not just the plus), but there are many non-Google apps that need to do the same, and it does still get updates. Supposedly they're working on a UI refresh[1], but that's what everyone who hasn't updated yet says.

I'm not arguing that a Tesla acquisition would have been better than the outcome we got, there's almost no way it would have been, but I would argue that that would be true for any company doing the acquiring. Acquisitions are just really tough for the identity of a product by their very nature.

[1] https://twitter.com/waze/status/584435142040690688

[DavidAdams]

Youtube

[mikeash]

They're slowly strangling it now with obnoxious ads. These days I typically get an awful video ad before the actual video, a pop-up ad that obscures the video during the video, and I've even started to see cases where they interrupt the video in the middle for another awful video ad. I get that they have to make money somehow, but I think they're going to start strangling the goose that lays the golden eggs if they don't back off some.

It's not yet bad enough to say that they killed YouTube, but I'm afraid they might get there.

[magicalist]

Most ads I see are skippable these days, and the uploader can't set an overlay ad and a video ad on their videos. Vevo videos has those annoying "check out this other artist" thing on the side, but I assume they have some special deal in their contract, because no one else seems to be able to do that.

[awad]

Android

[untog]

Android?

[mikeash]

Tesla's development doesn't look to be particularly constrained by money at the moment. I'd worry that getting a bunch of cash from Uncle Google to expand rapidly would ultimately destroy the company, as compared to organic growth where they can take things at a proper pace.

I also find that eight-year guarantee to be rather unimpressive. The Model 3 will be the true start of Tesla's game changing, and the deal was basically that Tesla could be broken up or killed once the Model 3 showed up.

This deal was only on the table because Tesla was in crisis. The moment they recovered, it went away. Clearly they thought that they could do better on their own than they could if they were part of Google, and I see no reason to disagree.

[aerovistae]

Your thoughts seem based on incorrect information.

A. Musk has stated self-driving cars would be essentially finished by this summer, and only the laws and policies are lagging behind and keeping it from being fully released.

B. "How much more they could have been"? They're expanding at a ridiculous pace and are on-track to release a main-stream affordable car within a few years, something the established automakers have evidently been unable to do at all despite all their resources and established infrastructure.

C. "A better car"? What exactly are you comparing it to? Objectively the Model S has gotten the highest scores ever on nearly every single survey it's been part of. If you have a personal quibble with it, don't make out like that's the car's fault. If you're not happy with it "merely" being the best car on the market, I really don't know what you're looking for.

[mikeash]

Regarding A, are you sure about that? Autopilot is supposed to be essentially finished by this summer, but it's not even close to full self-driving capabilities. The Model S currently doesn't have the necessary sensor suite for full self-driving, and the software side is still deeply unsolved.

[aerovistae]

You're correct, my mistake. He said a few years. I misrecalled, so to speak.

[mikeash]

Confusion about what autopilot can actually do is pretty widespread, and autopilot is announced for the summer, so it's an understandable mixup.

Even a few years would be pretty cool. I hope he's right!