The Writely Backstory and Google's "1 or 2 technical acquisitions a week"

Surprisingly, there hasn't been much discussion of Eric Schmidt's comment during their Analyst Day (right after his discussion of the AOL transaction) that Google has been acquiring one or two companies a *week*. That's more than 100 acquistions in a year!

Just because we've all heard of Writely because it's been in the Web 2.0 spotlight and is taste fodder for the Google-Microsoft fight everyone wants to see, we don't see that this is another in a string of talent-oriented acquisitions, most of which don't have the benefit of the strong PR buzz around this one.

The Writely Back Story nicely demonstrates the true value that Google is attempting to capture in their acquisition strategy. The founders of Writely are an experienced development team that developed the underlying platform to Macromedia's DreamWeaver and prior to that developed other document oriented software.

Google isn't acquiring what Writely currently is, they are acquiring what the Writely team will develop over the next few years!