Google has become one of the world’s largest M&A powerhouse. Ever since its co-founder Larry Page took the position as its CEO, Google has overseen more than 120 deals, doubling M&A activity in the past three years. The breadth of acquisitions and mergers is grandeur–from Robotics to cloud services, biotechnology to the Internet of Things, Google has been taking an extremely progressive move by expanding its portfolio in all areas. It almost seems as if Google is expecting its search engine service to collapse for sure in the future.

What this tells is is that Google ultimately aspires to go beyond making money through online advertising and get into leading the next wave technology.

In 2005, Google bought “Android” for 50 million dollars, a company which by then have only existed for two years. It is told that Android proposed a deal to Samsung first, however they turned down the offer and as a result Android became a part of Google. Although Android was only a small company by then, Google was smart enough to make a bet by foreseeing the future of mobile phone market. Consequently, Google is now taking up 80 percent of the entire OS system.

From then on, Google has continued to make unprecedented M&As. For instance, Google bought a company called Lift Labs, a San Francisco company that makes a high-tech spoon designed to make it easier for people with neurodegerative tremors to eat. The numbers have not been disclosed so we cannot know for sure how much Google had to pay for this company. How much they paid for this acquisition is not all that important; what we want to know is why a search engine company is all of a sudden jumping into the spoon business.

Most of us take eating for granted. However, there are about 11 million people in the U.S. with either essential tremor or Parkinson’s disease who find even the simple act of lifting a spoon to be very difficult and disturbing. For these people, eating can be an embarrassing nightmare since the tremor makes eating very messy. So, Lift Lab’s Liftware device is basically a specially designed spoon and fork that makes eating easier by counteracting the tremors with a bunch of little swivels.

 

Lift Lab’s spoon

Did Google buy Lift Labs just to sell spoons for the disabled? The answer is probably no. For Google, buying this company is not just about making utensils but it’s rather more about finding out ways to improve the understanding and management of neurodegerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease or essential tremor.

Google has many more projects that are going on inside. They have recently announced in October that it is currently designing tiny magnetic particles to patrol the human body for signs of cancer and other diseases. In addition, Google is also currently developing a contact lens that monitors glucose levels and is also running a so-called baseline study that is an attempt to figure out what makes healthy people healthy.

Some other seemingly unconventional projects they are working on right now include self-driving cars, delivery drone system that fly your packages to your door, and Project Loon, providing internet services to poor and rural areas through flying balloons into the stratosphere.

Google’s first self-driving car

 

No one can predict the future–we don’t know if Google is making a smart choice until we see what happens in the future. Google may collapse or may create an empire in which people cannot imagine their lives without Google. I can’t wait to find out where Google will stand in 30 years.