Whoever Has the Most Toys, Wins
Or do they? In the past couple of years, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have been buying up little niche products and technologies and absorbing them into their collectives like mad little scientists working in a lab. It reads like a whos-who of the IT world.
Feedburner - Very recent purchase and something many of us bloggers use. Good move Google!
Blogger - Awesome concept but I think it went by the wayside as Blogger became the MySpace for blogger-wanna-bes. Still some good bloggers use it, but I don't think it's panned out the way Google wanted it to.
Picasa - Neat desktop app that I tried out a few times and well done. Hopefully they'll do something with this in the near future.
Youtube - Biggest acquisition that I know of (who has this much money besides Microsoft?) but with thousands of videos being pulled every day by Viacom or someone else threatening to sue, I wonder what the future holds.
DoubleClick - Have no idea what this is all about as DoubleClick is the evil of the Internet. Maybe they bought it to kill it off (doubt it).
Yahoo
Flickr - Probably the best photo site out there, many new features being added all the time and nobody nearly as interesting as these guys out there in this space.
Konfabulator - Never really caught on and too many people compared it to the Mac desktop (which already had this capability OOTB). Windows Gadgets tries to be like this but again not a huge community swelling up around this.
del.icio.us - Next to Flickr, one of the best buys for Yahoo and the best social bookmarking system out there.
Microsoft
Connectix - Huge boost in the virtual space, although I think it still trails behind VMWare
Groove - What put Ray Ozzie on the map is now part of Office 2007 and still growing.
Winternals - Best move MS made in a long time, awesome tools from these guys who know the inner workings of Windows better than Microsoft in some cases
FolderShare - Great peer-to-peer file sharing system, but hasn't really taken off has it?
There's a bunch more but I didn't want to get too obscure here. There's a very cool graph here that will show you the acquisitions and timelines.
Who's Left?
And here's the hot ticket items these days that are still blowing in the wind. It's anyone's guess who goes up on the block next and who walks away with the prize.
Facebook - Whoever gets this gets gold at 100,000 new members a day (!). My money is on MS to pull out the checkbook any day now.
Digg - Kevin Rose, who's already probably laughing his way to the bank will cash in big time on this if someone grabs it. Maybe Google to offset the Yahoo del.icio.us purchase?
Slashdot - Yeah, like anyone would want this except to hear Cowboy Neal talk about himself (don't worry, Slashdotters don't read my blog - I hope)
Any others?
(SharePointKicks... yeah I wish)
Maybe it's a good, maybe it's bad, my question is who will end up with the most toys? Or maybe once all the little ducks are bought up the three top dogs will duke it out with one winner walking away. UFC at the Enterprise level kids. Should be a fun match.