I'm quite surprised that with some of Google's recent pickups more people aren't concerned about how it may negatively impact competition. We might get a better travel search out of this but I personally would have enjoyed seeing a company other than Google be successful at search for once. Same with AdMob -- Google is already a giant powerful advertising company. Not sure they really needed to gobble up AdMob to be successful there.

Part of Google's challenge may be that many of the best engineers now prefer to go the startup route and build something they're passionate about, rather than join a large corporation, even Google.

And Google's ~$25B in the bank is much better spent buying and integrating those companies than investing in mortgage securities and whatnot.

How has Google's history of buying and integrating companies gone? I know about successes like Android or Google Voice, but what about failures? I guess there aren't any epic failures as of yet (we'd know about them), but it's unlikely they've been 100% successful.

I recall people panning the purchase of grandcentral because of the incredibly long delay between purchase and launch of Google Voice...

It is hard to tell what purpose a company is acquired for (talent, technology, marketshare...) and thus difficult to tell whether it was fruitful.

Dodgeball's a commonly cited failure. The founders left two years after being acquired to start a very similar competitor, which even has a hilariously similar name (Foursquare), and then Google discontinued Dodgeball two years after that.

Some hits, some misses. It's hard for anybody to say with authority just how many should have been hits but were not. I think it's unrealistic to expect ALL of them to be a net win. Nobody can predict the future, not even Google.

NOTE TO SELF: start a web-based service that successfully predicts the future. Sell out to Google.