Google vs. Symantec, McAfee? Not exactly
Good Morning Silicon Valley headlines the typical (over) reaction "The five scariest words in tech: Google has entered your market (security version).
"The folks at Symantec, McAfee and the other big computer security outfits may want to requisition some extra antacids for the office medicine cabinet on the news that Google has made its first acquisition of anti-malware technology, GreenBorder."
"Forget about Symantec, or McAfee, is Google going to rule security, Alan Shimel says in a rosy forecast for Google's security future.
A commenter at his blog, Kurt Wismer, however, underscores that "the acquisition of greenborder is actually not google's first foray into security":
"the malware warnings in their results pages were a direct answer to site advisor (at least the first incarnation - i haven't looked at site advisor since before it was acquired by mcafee)... of course site advisor's initial functionality was something that deserved to be baked into the net at the search engine level anyways..."
What IS the BIG deal? A simple Google buy versus build technology decison for security software does not a sector killer move make.
Google is far from a guaranteed winner in every initiative it undertakes. In the grand Google acquisitions scheme of things, Google may even have racked up more losers than winners.
Google's splashy big bet dMarc Broadcasting radio advertising play went no where, but the company's founders did, they bailed out of the Googleplex! The engineering team behind low-budget Dodgeball also couldn't wait to regain their independence, from Google.
Google has no no slam dunk in Chad Hurley's YouTube Kingdom either. The company faces billions in copyright infringement exposure and impending high-level competition that just might make a video go of it.
DoubleClick at $3.1 billion? The FTC is closing in on that one and Microsoft aQuantive at $6 billion is looming, not to mention Yahoo's "low-budget" Right Media.
AND, where in the world is JotSpot? One Google post-acquisition strategy is simply to "do nothing," with the acquired company.
UPDATE: Google: Beware virtualization, GreenBorder NO security panacea
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