because the capital bubble made it suddenly unaffordable - google can afford $X00k to bench talent, but talent will only take that deal for several years at which point they are financially free, bored, and current equity prices are just too outrageously attractive

Maybe they killed a hundred similar companies and those three slipped through?

Hundreds of Facebooks?

Very unlikely

I think that maybe we underestimate how hard it is to choose the right companies to “kill” when you’re a competitor. The default mode is to say that they won’t go anywhere because of many factors (they don’t have the resources, the access, the capability, etc). But sometimes they do. And in restrospect it’s obvious, but it’s not by the time you had the chance to stop it. And I think it’s probably good.

Also hard to marshal the resources you need internally to "kill" a competitor. Sometimes the way to handicap a startup rival is to build the feature / product yourself, but then the bigtech firm runs into the challenges of moving a large org quickly.

> why didn’t Google

Because hubris.

One glaring flaw of well-capitalized large tech (perhaps the only one) is thinking they can build something better internally, when they have enough cash to simply buy best of breed off the market.

At times Google understood this: Android 2005, YouTube 2006, Writely/GoogleDocs 2006, DoubleClick 2007, Motorola Mobility 2012, Waze 2013, DeepMind 2014

Either thinking they can build something better internally, thinking the new thing doesn't matter, or realizing that it does matter but not having the ability to move fast and commercialize it.

e.g. Microsoft circa 2000 didn't think they could build a better internet. They just thought that the internet didn't really matter that much. Google in 2022 knew that LLMs mattered, and had spent a ton of money, but OpenAI just got a better product to market faster.

I'd add HTC's mobile phone unit to the list of strategically important Google acquisitions (and prehaps Dropcam, too). Without either of those -- even with all the fits & starts, they'd never have gotten to where they are today, building pretty great hardware with pretty good support and a decent supply chain, and largely with "good" software on top.