$228m - Small change
to Google....
Google has ditched social network tech outfit Slide just one year after the company spent $182m on it, plus a further $46m in staff retention bonuses, in August 2010. As we wrote at the time, the takeover appeared to signal Google's plans to have yet another stab at creating a social network that its users might actually like …
"Innovation requires you to try many things before you have hits"
Rubbish. It's certainly true that innovative products may not prove popular; but some do, and there's no dependency between a successful one and a series of prior failures.
Take Apple. It's widely regarded as an innovative firm (I think most of that is in packaging and marketing, but no matter), and has, by my rough count, about a 50% hit rate for major products. That starts with Apple's *first* real product, the Apple ][. Then two failures (Apple ///, Lisa) and a hit (Mac), and the hits and failures continued to alternate.
Facebook can claim some innovations, particularly in comparison with its major competition in its early years, and is a hit with its first and essentially only product. (If you want to count various FB features as "products", it still had successes - eg the apps API - before significant failures like Beacon.)
Google's thrashing about and carelessness with its cash should not be excused as an attempt at "innovation". It's a combination of lots of money on the balance sheet, lack of vision, and leading by ego rather than reason. I don't care, particularly; for me Google is a way for advertisers to subsidize a convenient online function, and I'm happy for them to do that. But why people need to turn Google's blunders into secret wisdom is beyond me.
(Oh, and recouping part of the Slide investment from its code? Yes, no doubt that will be the silver lining. The typical social networking site is built on a pile of ad hockery that a couple of interns could concoct in a week.)