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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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,\u00a0Google is now taking up 80 percent of the entire OS system.<\/p>\n
From then on, Google has continued to make unprecedented M&As. For instance, Google bought a company called Lift Labs,\u00a0<\/em>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\u00a0why\u00a0<\/em>a search engine company is all of a sudden jumping into the spoon business.<\/p>\n 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,\u00a0Lift Lab’s\u00a0<\/em>Liftware device is basically a specially designed spoon and fork\u00a0that makes eating easier by counteracting the tremors with a bunch of little swivels.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n