News broke out by the ‘Times today (no registration required) that Google has acquired dMarc, a software vendor that allows marketers to advertise in local radio stations without the manual hitch-kitch. And that too for more than an average Web 2.0 company, or rather any company they’ve ever acquired: $1 billion. Their plans, not surprisingly, are to get its 400,000 marketers (clients) to advertise into Google [as well]. Now, I see something very clearly here. Do you?
What I see is that Google would rather spend more money buying 400,000 advertisers (essentially that’s what they’re doing) than investing into revolutionary future technology. And why? Well, that’s where the money is. I guess Jason Calacanis was right. They don’t want to “organise the worlds information and make it universally accessible”. They just want the ad dollars from the marketers and the clicks from us. It’s easy to get these if you’re Google. Just get your software in millions of houses around the world, get them to use your search engine and browse websites with your ads on, and guess what — you have your money, investors are happy, all goes well.
To be honest, I didn’t believe in Jason Calacanis’s theory (and still believed Google was a ‘cool company’) until today when I just read this article. Now I know. I guess sometimes you are what your motto isn’t.
