Google has a reputation as an innovative company, but in fact it owes a lot of its success to acquisitions.

Google basically bought AdSense, the paid search platform that made it a financial powerhouse, from Applied Semantics in 2003.

In addition, three of the four non-search businesses that Google has identified as its future -- YouTube, Android, and display advertising -- were acquired and run more or less independently today. The fourth -- enterprise apps -- was helped greatly by the acquisition of Postini.


There were also plenty of acquisitions that never paid off. Google is not as bad as Microsoft in this respect, but it does have a couple of embarrassing $100 million mistakes.

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