News on Techcrunch yesterday: "Google may buy video search startup Baarzo". These kinds of announcements don't surprise me anymore these days. Every day there seems to be a start up being acquired by one of the major internet companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple or Yahoo.
In this particular example, Google makes sure it keeps the dominant player in the search engine industry especially in video search (in which the company already is almost the only player). By coincidence I knew the startup Baarzo, it allows users to find specific moments in a video and from experience I know it works surprisingly well.
On the one hand I think it is great that the start up companies get (financial/ investment) support from the major companies. By themselves it is very hard to get the required skills, expertise, marketing etc from the ground to become a significant player on the internet. On the other hand, sometimes it strikes me a bit that all the innovation on the internet comes from smaller players and is quickly bought by the existing players. This keeps the internet primarily their domain; it will be harder and harder to get a share for other companies. This might prevent significant innovations in the future (existing players might not want to adopt any new innovation that doesn't support their activities) and competition gets less and less
http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/21/google-buying-baarzo/
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