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.