Most Stupid Google Acquisitions Ever

Monday, Aug 24, 2020, 9:31 am

By:Tony Williams

1.FeedBurner

This purchase was all about trying to control RSS feeds, but of course they did not get the main player in the industry and how many people actually use them? This is such a limited market that you have to question their sanity.

2.Like.com

Google decided to buy like.com for a lot of money and you have to question as to why they decided to do that. This website would search for things similar to the image you are looking at, but then they have that in their own google images search, so what is the point?

3.Gizmo5

This is a company that specialized in VOIP, but of course they timed it wrong because of the rise of the likes of Skype and other free options. This then meant that they had no option but to close it down because the market just was not there for them to do anything with it.

4.Phatbits

This website is all about giving you tools to design widgets. This does at least sound pretty good, but then if you are the type of person who is interested in designing widgets, then you will have your own programs that you work on rather than using this.

5.Dealmap

Google obviously saw that people were interested in local deals, but they really missed the boat a bit with getting Dealmap. Instead, they lost out to the likes of Groupon and who actually knows about this company anyway?

6.Plannr

This was all about planning events and yes that basically was everything that there was to it. It worked both via email and as a mobile app, but then we have diaries and there are far better options out there right now that it just does not justify them buying it.

7.Where2

On the face of it this sounds interesting as it is a GPS based website that alerts drivers to traffic. However, do we really need Google for this due to the number of devices that are now installed in cars as standard?

8.Grand Central

Nope they did not buy the train station, but instead this was a company that was involved in telephone management although it did not work out as they hoped. Instead, they rebranded it, added some new features, and then brought it out as Google Voice.

9.Picnik

Everybody loves a picnic don't they? Well they do unless it is actually Picnik and it is an image editing website. The idea is that you can edit pictures online, but then so many people have the likes of Photoshop at home that it really is pointless.

10.Panoramio

This website is all about panoramic pictures, but it just seems to be pretty pointless considering Google have just mapped what seems to be the entire world. There are so many other image based websites out there that this just seems to be useless.

11.Jaiku

Google realized that social networking was huge, but then they ran into problems after getting Jaiku. The problem was that this website combined both social networking and blogging and all that then happened was it was a resounding flop and it closed in 2009.

12.Slide

This on the face of it sounded good, but after Google bought this Facebook app developer things quickly went downhill. In actual fact the entire thing ended up closing in a relatively short period of time and that made the entire thing pretty pointless.

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