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happymellontoday at 4:52 AM1 replyview on HN

Although in this case Meta bought companies that were already established and successful.

Google bought Android before it had released products.

Google Maps was purchased, but was Where 2 actually a successful product prior to that?


Replies

hn_throwaway_99today at 6:16 AM

I feel like you just cherry picked from my examples. YouTube was certainly successful - Google bought them because their own Google Video competitor was a flop. DoubleClick was also obviously huge. Where 2 had a successful product, it just wasn't web based (nor do I think free), so didn't have anywhere near the distribution that Google enabled once the team ported it to run in a browser.