Google has some amazing negotiating skills - paying 50% more for something they literally tried to get not even a year ago... (they tried to get it at 23 billing not even a year ago)
Yeah, but Instagram and WhatsApp have billions of users. Everybody has heard of them. Advertising on Instagram generates revenue.
Wiz is a SaaS b2b startup. Even on a forum for startups most people haven't heard of them.
Wiz reportedly has a revenue of 750m. It would take Google 30 years or more to break even on this deal. But like all bs startups Wiz will fade into irrelevancy 6 months after being acquired.
The difference is that Google is the worse product company among the big tech companies. It’s like the modern day Yahoo! - where acquisitions go to die.
I don't know man, iPhones and Macs are really buggy, bloated/full of unnecessary features, and user hostile. Microsoft products are also hot garbage. The cars we get to pay tens of thousands (or even hundreds) are pretty much garbage now. It's not just Google.
I am not talking about opinions on quality. I’m talking about objective measures in introducing a new product that moves the needle as far as revenue/profit and market share that is not cancelled quickly
Again, the parent's point stands. Apple is not changing the game with Apple Vision Pro or Apple Intelligence. Microsoft isn't getting accolades for Windows 11 and Copilot. It's not always smart to bet the farm on a product that nobody wants to pay for.
Objectively speaking Google is one of the few companies that saw where the puck was headed and skated there. They built TensorFlow, they sponsored serious local AI research. Now they build their own in-house training and inference hardware. Relative to the struggling we see from the rest of FAANG, I would argue Google is perhaps the only successful competitor left. I despise their monopoly abuse of AdSense, but they're not going to be effectively prosecuted with protectionist American policy defending them. Google "won" the services sector and now everyone and their mother is butthurt.
TensorFlow is a technology not a product. Having things in a “research” lab are not products. What product have they introduced in the past decade? 15 years? Android is the only one that has gotten any meaningful traction.
Does Google have a better LLM based product than OpenAI’s ChatGPT? Well personally for my use case, NotebookLM is better for some things. But it isn’t a better product for most people.
Androids position is so bad in the market as far as convincing consumers with money to buy one, Google has to pay Apple $20B+ a year to be the default search engine. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google pays more to be the default search engine on Apple devices than Google makes in mobile for Android.
From a consumer standpoint, Android has seen declining market share in the US, the Nest acquisition is floundering, Stadia was a failure, Pixel ships about the same number in a year that Apple ships iPhone in a a couple of weeks, WearOS has gone nowhere, no real tablet strategy (I Chromebooks have been a success in education so that’s kind of a mitigating factor), their tv strategy has pivoted a half dozen times, their messaging app strategy is schizophrenic (they had 5 separate messaging apps simultaneously at one point), AI summaries for Google search are half baked.
On the business side, GCP is just pathetic. I don’t mean as far as technology. But their account management, enterprise sales team and customer service is lackluster. I mentioned in another comment that when I worked at AWS ProServe, we never considered them a serious competitor.
GSuite has gained some traction in smaller companies. But hasn’t made a dent in government and enterprise where the real money is.
Look at Microsoft and Apple’s product mix as far as successful profit generating products and compare that to Google’s.
Almost every part of the iPhone is also based on acquisitions. Android was a bad BlackBerry knock off before Google acquired. Android as it exists today is mostly Google.
YouTube and even AdSense were based on an acquisition.
Heck, Apple as we know it today was based largely on the Next acquisition.
This is meant to be politically-neutral commentary: this deal doesn't happen without a Republican in office that will squash the antitrust bent that the Biden administration started.
It's also possible the last Wiz deal happens without the antitrust swirling over Google.
> FTC Chairman Ferguson and Omeed Assefi, Acting Assistant Attorney General of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, announced on February 18, 2025, that the FTC and DOJ will continue to use the 2023 Merger Guidelines as the framework for their merger review process.
Rump likes to play favorites and use any power at his disposal to hurt his political / personal enemies or people he thinks don't "respect" him enough. He also is a fan of extorting people.
So I wouldn't count on it based on some generic "pro-business" position. Google is going to have to kiss the ring one way or another.
I just don't think the anti trust case is as strong in the security industry vs. many other parts of the software industry. I don't think a Biden admin would necessarily have jumped to try and block this sort of acquisition either.
Since Sundar took over as CEO at Google (August 10, 2015):
- Google is up 5.2X - I am not sure how you got 152%
- Apple is up 10X
- Microsoft is up 8.25X
- Netflix is up 7.45X
- Amazon us up 7.28X
- Facebook is up 6.27X
Google has the worst returns in ten years of the FAANG(+M) companies. A 5X increase in ten years is still phenomenal, but it's important to not look at that number in isolation.
And for fun:
- Nvidia is up 207X
- Intel is down 12%
- The S&P 500 is up 2.72X
Microsoft was also up by leaps and bounds when Ballmer was in charge and RIM had its highest market cap in 2010 - three years after the iPhone was introduced.
That has nothing to do with whether Google has the ability to create new great products and it has failed miserably at that over the past decade.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41042034
That being said, Instagram and WhatsApp were expensive for Facebook and those ended up being a steal. Time will tell, as usual.