I& #39;ll bite. The first statement may be factually correct, but I disagree with this take.

Half of Google& #39;s fortress ecosystem was built or accelerated via M&A.

Home run deals:
DoubleClick/Semantic Labs/AdMob, Keyhole/Where2, Postini, Android, YouTube, Waze https://twitter.com/PythiaR/status/1247680244896526337">https://twitter.com/PythiaR/s...

Much of its ad tech that allows it to monetize unlike any other, AdSense, AdWords, DoubleClick, were acquired.

Gmail& #39;s spam filtering, powered by Postini, was one of main reasons ppl signed up.

Keyhole was the foundation of Maps.

YouTube, Waze, Android, need no explaining.

GV/GC have also had many successes (Uber, Stripe, Slack, Snap, Zscaler, DocuSign, Cloudera, FanDuel, Glassdoor, SpaceX *ducks* etc.) It& #39;s not really M&A, and they& #39;re able to capitalize on the Google name so success is a bit self-selecting there.

The worst deal has been Motorola, which they bought for $12B, but even that wasn& #39;t as bad as ppl make it.

Let& #39;s break that down though:
Motorola had $3.2B of net cash
$2.4B of NOLs
They sold the STB biz to Arris for $2.3B
Sold the phone biz to Lenovo for $2.9B

So net net, they paid about $2B and kept all the patents. What are those worth? I have no idea but consensus at the time was it was a superior portfolio to Nortel& #39;s patents that Apple/Microsoft bought for $4B.

Yes, there are a lot of science experiments like Google Glass, Project Loon, Google Fiber, but every now and then you also get a Chrome, Android, Photos, Waymo or Verily. Fast iteration is what you want or else you end up owning something that looks like IBM or Intel.