Why Google Buys Companies

The end goal of acquiring a company may be aligned with Google’s overall mission. We can paraphrase it as 1) grab all the world’s data, 2) make that data useful and accessible in order to direct user attention towards it, 3) profit from ads displayed with the data. Google’s hardware business aside, the company indeed just sells attention. If you look at it from a bird’s view, you could perhaps split up Google’s goals into the two philosophies make money (more the manager or ad sales types) and build the ultimate AI (the developer types).