roy

I keep visiting meg & dia's myspace page 'cause their songs are so friggin' catchy! I pre-ordered their EP today (which comes with an autographed CD booklet, woot!) ...

In any case, I saw a post that quoted a Wired article that basically said Google passed on buying MySpace for $290mil because Google figured they could build it themselves. The post then calls this a "strategic blunder." I read the Wired article, and it's clear that MySpace was really a perfect fit for News Corp; Google's purchase of MySpace would not have led to the success we see today from MySpace. Why?

News Corp is a media company. Google is a technology company. The Wired article even went so far to quote Rupert Murdoch when he said that (I'm paraphrasing because I don't have the actual article in front of me) "News Corp could afford to wait on building a net presence because they were not a technology company."

Clearly, if Google had purchased this popular social networking site, they would have spent a lot of time trying to improve the technology of the site instead of playing to MySpace's strengths. It's also not clear how long Google would have kept the existing staff (Tom and Chris DeWolfe), whereas Murdoch has the foresight (according to the Wired article) of giving them multimillion dollar bonuses to stay on and continue their work.

I'm a bit skeptical about Google's M&A abilities - the way they botched Blogger leaves a bad taste in my mouth. So was this a strategic blunder by Google? No way. Buying MySpace would have been a strategic blunder for Google, not passing ...