[irfn]

>Defunkt makes it sound like it was a choice and they were a steward ... bs. If Google had a better offer, it would have been done.

Exactly! Total BS!

There are however some things that would motivate many founders to turn down their(Google) offers.

- Biggest issue with Google Acquisitions. They want the business and not the tech. They want to rewrite the tech riding their high horse. - They often wont offer full time roles to employees of acquired companies and would keep them on contract positions pending "interview" for full time.

[autoexecdotbat]

I'll cry if/when Google buys some enterprise software I happen to support one more time. The appeal for a lot of niche enterprise software is responsive/knowledgeable tech support, willingness to implement feaure requests, and their ability to meet SLAs. All of these instantly drop to zero in a google buyout. Also there's no guarantee that the software will even exist in a usable way within a year.

I say this purely anecdotally, though, so take it as such. It has been a point of considerable personal frustration in the past. One instance was particularly painful because we had engaged the particular company looking for several custom features, and were basically buying a sizable percentage of the product they sold, with the promise that they would work with us implementing those features. When google bought them out, not only did the ability to get features implmented vanish, but so did the ones in flight.