Tech News for the Day: 14 April 2007

Two breaking news happened today, one good and one bad (for Apple fans). The first is that Google has announced that they have agreed to acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in cash The other is that Apple has delayed the release of new version of Mac OS X Leopard till October 2007 because of the IPhone. We offer some thoughts on this two interesting technology news which hit the press today.

Doubling the size of their YouTube Acquisition (US$1.6B), Google has acquired the company DoubleClick for US$3.1B in cash (Source: TechCrunch). For the past few months, Microsoft and Google are on bidding war to acquire DoubleClick.

The sale offers Google two important advantages. It helps Google to expand vertically as they have been trying to move from online advertising (which they made their name) into display ads, which is the core competency of DoubleClick. They will acquire access to DoubleClick’s advertisement software and more importantly, its relationships with Web publishers, advertisers and advertising agencies. DoubleClick generated $300 million last year, and since it’s acquired at US$3.1B, it means that a valuation of 10 times is made for this mature company, and according to TechCrunch, it is healthy. The key is that it kept Microsoft out of the game in the domination of online advertising.

Speaking of which, lately whenever some of us attended business plan presentation of internet companies, the notion of “being acquired by Google” is popping up in most startups. Sounded like the old days which most people want their companies to be acquired by Microsoft.

Another news that hit the wall is that Apple has announced the delay of Mac OSX Leopard (version 10.5) till Oct 2007. From the official press release (we quote excerpts of that) :

iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned….. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned……. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones.

Reading the last line, we thought that it offers good advice to entrepreneurs who usually present their business plans and tell us that they would be able to come up with the product in their designated time period. Most of the time, it takes longer than what they think it would be. Of course, since two of the co-founders are Mac users, we are “shattered” as we expect the Mac OSX Leopard will turn up in June.

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