Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Exactly. I think this really ... To me, crystallized this being a classic. Google decided they wanted to get into the business of productivity apps and they wanted to take typically Google bent on it and put them in the browser instead of being installed software on your PC. They decided to get into this business and made the judgment that buying was going to be a faster way to get there than building in-house. Yeah, it sure does feel like a case study in the buy versus build. I think that dropping, let's say, $50 million shortcutted their time to market dramatically and put all that brain power in-house right away. What's interesting is it's also ... I think in blending a little bit in the tech themes here, but ... I don't know what Google thought at the time in terms of their strategy, but as the battleground for productivity software has really evolved at that time, it was Word and Excel and PowerPoint installed on your computer. To now, this whole suite of not just those applications but also your e-mail. Also, your cloud services as an organization. What do your ... Not only the third-party software you're running, which is your e-mail, which is your word processing, which is your spreadsheets, but also your internal company apps that you're running on. Whether that's AWS or Google Cloud Engine or Microsoft Azure, as that's really evolved in the last few years, it's almost been this mix within Google, that they bought the traditional productivity software. The e-mail piece with Gmail and the cloud piece which we can argue about how much success they've had there relative to Amazon, they built in-house. Interesting.…

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