Google Broadens its Portfolio (Again)
Well, after hearing the news a few weeks ago that Google was going to halt new development to focus on improving their already vast array of products and services (Features not Products), I thought that they finally gained the focus needed to evolve, mature and round-out their already dizzying array of products. So I was really shocked to see the second of two announcements of an acquisition in a period of about two weeks. The first announcement was made a few weeks ago when they announced the acquisition of YouTube. That didn’t surprise me as it was an obvious hole in their product portfolio and also represented a sizable boost of traffic and a potential foothold in the explosive video market. I thought that would take them a while to digest and there would be little, if any, news from Google until the end of the year. However, today’s announcement that they were acquiring JotSpot took me by surprise (although it shouldn’t have).
As we built the business over the past three years Google consistently attracted our attention. We watched them acquire Writely, and launch Google Groups, Google Spreadsheets and Google Apps for Your Domain. It was pretty apparent that Google shared our vision for how groups of people can create, manage and share information online. Then when we had conversations with people at Google we found ourselves completing each other’s sentences. Joining Google allows us to plug into the resources that only a company of Google’s scale can offer, like a huge audience, access to world-class data centers and a team of incredibly smart people.
It’s no surprise that Google is trying to get a full online office sweet out the door before Microsoft has a chance to. Based on my observations, it looks as though they are one step closer. I don’t see the YouTube acquisiton contributing to the accomplishment of that end, but JotSpot will play a big part. With gmail, google docs and spreadsheets, google calendar, google chat, Reader (still in development) and now JotSpot (google wiki???), it would appear all that they need to round out their online offering is a a good presentation tool (Thumbstacks?) and perhaps some type of database tool they will be good to go.
My bet is by late-winter / early-spring, they will have built / bought their way to a dominant position in the online office / productivity space.
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