What are your favorite Google Acquisitions? My top three are…

For those keeping score, Google has been busy in the acquisition department over the years, in fact they’ve acquired over 180 companies to-date. Techcrunch wrote an article today highlighting some of the more well-known acquisitions and it made me think back to a few that I can remember, and one that even changed my daily life. Below are a few of my personal favorites:

Google Voice

A company called Grand Central was acquired by Google for $45M back in 2007, that company became Google Voice. The company had only raised $6M at the time and was actually in the process of raising another round…until Google came and in scooped them up.

Bump-APP

Remember the Bump app? This was a very popular app in the early iPod/iPhone days and I remember thinking that it was going to replace business cards. So…that never happened and instead Google bought them and shut them down, so their site now says:

Bump homepage

Last but not least is Sparrow, my all-time favorite email client for the Mac which, uh, Google bought and stopped supporting in favor of sending users to gmail.com. No surprises here but I do really miss Sparrow, it was awesome.

sparrow-for-mac

Now, if you look around you can find Google’s new homepage for Sparrow now that they’ve pulled it off the app store. Of course you don’t have to be too sad as it looks like Sparrow was probably behind some of the cool things Google has been doing with Inbox.

sparrow-mac

Feel free to share some of your favorite’s, going forward it’s likely that it will be Alphabet, Inc. not Google making most of the acquisitions. Either way I’m looking forward to following the adventure, Google is a creative company and when they acquire companies, they often also acquire incredibly bright and talented people that continue to make Google…err, Alphabet Inc. the tech giant it is today.

Now it’s your turn, what are your favorite Google acquisitions?

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton