I wonder if Google believes that acquiring enough social networking startups will enable them to cobble something together that competes with Facebook. I suppose it's possible, but I'm skeptical.
Probably talent acquisitions: people who already know the field, and who have demonstrated their ability to create a social network. I wouldn't describe it as cobbling, although I suppose they are cobbling a team together from lots of different groups.
It's not like a social network is a difficult thing to build. Google's got the audience, all they have to do is build something that's useful and addictive.
I think one of Google's main problems in respect to building apps, is they stick to their overly simple design principles, which don't lend themselves to complex services like social networks. If you log into Orkut as an early adopter, it's not that impressive at all. Similar experience with Wave.
Hmm, that's not entirely accurate. They list Google Docs under Labs, but the word processor part at least came from their acquisition of Writely, if I am not mistaken.
If you look at the iPhone, the two most important parts were acquired too. WebKit used to be KDE's KHTML and multitouch was acquired too. And all the cool apps were done by Google.
All the cool apps were not done by Google, but _with_ Google. I can't imagine Apple delegating anything, less of all a main application like maps or youtube.
WebKit was not KHTML. Webcore was KHTML and Webkit, which offered a lot more, was built on top of Webcore. Eventually Apple decided to make Webkit open source (Webcore was already open source since KHTML was).
On the other hand you are very much correct on multitouch, and I would also mention Lala, and their ads company. Also iTunes was acquired. And of course the biggest acquisition of all (for Apple): NeXT. :)
They recently re-wrote their word processor engine - it previously used the browser's built-in HTML editor (which I believe is what Writely also did) - to a new one that handles all the layout manually in javascript.
Actually according to Wikipedia, Google Maps came from the acquisition of Where2. That said I imagine Google improved that application A LOT.
GMail and GReader on the other hand where two of those projects that Googlers did in their 20% assigned to personal projects. No idea about the other two.
I was an early user of Angstro, excellent product and team. I discovered tons of interesting & relevant content via Angstro, and Rohit and his team were quick to implement interesting features.
I don't seeee why they're wasting their time with this. Why don't they get all those supposedly talented people to stop reinventing the wheel when it comes to social networks?
