Google Will Continue Its Acquisition Binge This Year
Google expects to continue its acquisition spree this year, according to comments by one of its corporate development execs. — At a panel discussion at the Global Technology Symposium in Silicon Valley today, Google M …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third data point in a two-year arc of Google turning M&A into routine operations. BoomTown flagged Google among the giants fishing for acquisitions back in September 2009, MediaMemo tallied a $1.6 billion M&A bill for 2010 alone, and earlier this month the Wall Street Journal reported Google had cranked up its M&A machine. SAI's own mid-March rundown of Google's 15 biggest acquisitions framed the question of what all that buying actually produced.
Today's news closes the loop on whether the pace was a burst or a policy: a Google corporate development executive, speaking at the Global Technology Symposium, confirmed the company expects to keep the acquisition spree going through 2011. Coming the same week Google shipped Honeycomb tablets, began internal testing of Google Music, and set up a task force to curb Chrome's bloat, the message is that buying remains central to how the company fills product gaps.
First-order effects
- Startup founders and their investors now have a confirmed, standing exit channel into Google for 2011 — corporate development is signaling publicly that checks will keep being written, which shortens the sales cycle for anyone building in Google's target areas.
- Google's product organization takes on another year of absorbed codebases and teams on top of the fifteen largest deals already digested, deepening the integration workload at the same time it fights feature creep in Chrome.
Second-order effects
- Rival large-cap acquirers must match Google's openly declared pace or cede deal flow: when one buyer announces its appetite in advance, founders shop to it first and competing bids get pricier.
- The public commitment raises the stakes for Google's own execution — every new acquisition lands while the company is simultaneously integrating prior ones, making integration discipline, not deal sourcing, the bottleneck.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, capability acquisition stops being an exception and becomes a structural pillar of how major web platforms build products — R&D by checkbook alongside internal engineering.
- A sustained, publicly announced buying cadence from a company of Google's size also invites closer regulatory attention to how platform consolidation prices out independent exits for startups, though no specific action is on the table yet.
The trend: Large internet platforms are institutionalizing acquisition-led expansion as a core R&D function, with Google's deal cadence becoming the benchmark its peers are forced to match.