My learned experience with mergers/acquisitions is that it is a genuine skill to pull them off correctly.

In YouTube's case it's more likely that they saved it, IIRC the bandwidth bills and legal threats were getting pretty existential around the time of the purchase.

Being able to pull off being the only company to successfully do self-driving is a similarly masterful execution and I'm not sure how long it's going to take for competitors to catch up to them at this point.

>Inheriting those legal problems was a chance they took that could have sunk the entire company in a slightly dumber legal outcome for the status quo of the web, which was still very much in limbo at the time.

Yeah. Smartphones were barely a thing when Google bought YouTube and, more broadly, user-created video wasn't very widespread generally. YouTube's money-losing business, such as it was, mostly consisted of users violating copyright by uploading TV and movie clips.

How is that relevant? They also bought DoubleClick (the online advertising "hose")

They bought DoubleClick with revenues from paid search. (Google's market share was about 50% at the time.) The acquisition certainly helped them establish display marketing, though.

Google bought the seed that became Android. The startup had only been working on the mobile phone OS concept for about a year when Google acquired it in 2005 (originally they'd planned a camera OS). The first public Android phone wasn't released until 2008.

You could reasonably argue that only things Sergey and Larry didn’t buy is whatever they implemented personally.

They bought Maps too.

However, it would be silly to imply that either of those products were nearly as popular and solid/full-featured as they are now, by many magnitudes. Those products today are nothing compared to what they were back then. Even for me, as someone who has been using YouTube since way back then, just randomly seeing screenshots of the old YouTube throws me off and makes me go "is that what it really was back then? it doesn't even look similar at all".

And no, I don't mean it in a bad way. Up until about Honeycomb (3.0) or Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0), Android imo felt more like "minimum viable product that technically has feature parity with Apple and some more, but you have to have some really good justification to willingly pick it for any reason other than the price", and the experience of using it felt entirely subpar. The release of 4.0 (or 3.0, i honestly forgot) was when Android started feeling like an actual solid competitor to Apple for the first time, and not just an obvious "second best option".

Google has a pretty solid acquisition record, and definitely a solid record of investing in the products that do work and really upgrading them. It’s a shame they have cancelled a lot of products, but let’s be honest do they cancel stuff that’s making money or could be making money at scale? Generally not much I think.