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Google never really was generous with its acquisitions: many of its most successful ones like Blogger, KeyHole (Earth), Where2 (Maps), Writely (Docs), Zenter (Presentations), Urchin (Analytics) and Android were for tiny dollar amounts, sub-$100M. And the really big ones - YouTube and DoubleClick, and to a lesser extent Metaweb - turned out to be worth way more than Google paid for them. The only big duds I can think of where Google paid a "generous" amount for something that didn't really make them a whole lot were Motorola, Andy Rubin's robot collection (Boston Dynamics etc.), and Skybox, and in all cases they managed to sell them off for decent amounts.



Google got to keep Motorola Mobility's patent portfolio and license them back to Lenovo I believe.


And I think they dodged a bullet by failing to acquire Groupon (for $6bn).




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