Google Executive: No Time to Build, So We Buy

You wonder when the first time an executive at Cisco said this. 10-15 years later, the company seems almost incapable of building <i>anything</i>, except for new Cisco-looking bezels for the products they've acquired. If you're an engineer at Cisco and you get an MRD --- not even for a new product, but simply for version 3.0 of something already shipping --- the rational move to make is to go start a company to build it. After all, even if you kick ass and kill yourself to built it internally, they'll still buy someone else; after all, "someone else" comes with customers attached already.<p>Then again, who's to say that's a bad thing? Cisco steamrolls over its competition; entrepreneurial devs get multiple bites at a $5-$25MM apple; new products get shipped. I'm not being sarcastic: the strategy works.<p>Takes a bit of the fun out of it for Googlers, though.

It's kinda hard to talk about all acquisitions equally. Take Android for example: founded in 2003, acquired in by Google in 2005 and launched in 2008 (launched widely in 2009). I would call it both a successful acquisition and a successful Google product.<p>Groupon, OTOH, seemed like a wholly different thing - they already had a big name, lots of customers and independent identity. Seems like google wanted to buy them to move into a whole new area, rather than building them slowly into the company like Maps, Android, Docs etc

It seems too easy to interpret these statements to mean that Google would rather buy a company than build a new product.<p>From reading the actual quotes, seems like the executive was speaking very specifically about entering into a whole new line of business like acquiring Groupon would have represented.