Waits for the inevitable "we're switching from Lisp to Python" announcement...
I've heard that the Python folks already drove most of the Lisp folks out. Lisp is only used for a very small part of their infrastructure, from what I've been told.
Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million
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Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million
#12Is it just me or does that sound cheap? Though I'm sure Google has a far better idea of ITA's revenues than we do. CrunchBase says they had a $100MM Series A round in 2006, but they've been around since 1996.
I'm thinking that's going down as a 'returned 2x capital' sort of purchase on the VC score sheets, unless they took most of the company in the Series A. It's impressive that they ran for nearly 5 years on a Series A, if they did. I also think the value for Google here isn't revenues so much as controlling another piece of the internet transactional infrastructure.
They have substantial revenue, so not taking much investment isn't surprising. I just wonder what the thought process was in deciding to sell to Google at this price.
This must still be a huge win for the founders. They probably still had most of the equity since they only took one round of financing, and at a point when the company was already mature.
Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million
#13Waits for the inevitable "we're switching from Lisp to Python" announcement...
I've heard that the Python folks already drove most of the Lisp folks out. Lisp is only used for a very small part of their infrastructure, from what I've been told.
@smanek is a Lisper and worked for ITA a few years ago I believe so perhaps he'll chime in.
Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million
#14Hopefully Google will make flight search suck less. Currently even the most basic searches like "What's the cheapest I can fly from any airport within 50 miles of my house to any airport within 50 miles of NYC at any point during August" are impossible. I understand it's a computationally expensive question, but why the hell can't I just buy $5 bucks worth of computing time for an answer if I potentially stand to save a couple hundred bucks.
Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million
#15Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million
#16[deleted]
Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million
#17Google says "...we think there is room for more competition..." - but now they own both how most people find tickets and the service that provides the link between the airlines and the internet. My guess is that they will keep with their mantra of giving user's the fastest possible answer by providing links to buy tickets in response to queries like "cheap sf tickets". Problems for companies like Orbitz ahead?
Google is already starting to apply this approach to accommodation, another high value segment. Searches for hotels in most cities now return as their first result a Google map with listings of actual hotels - over time I expect these to become more expansive and traffic to independent hotel aggregators to decline. With the current strategy Google is moving to an approach where they scrape review and hotel data from all the aggregators and then serves this in its own listings - eliminating the need for its users to perform a secondary search with a independent aggregator.
Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million
#18Looking forward to finding amazing flight deals in the very near future assuming Google will take this to a whole new level.
I wonder what this means for Kayak/Bing/Orbitz
Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million
#19Google will lose lots of short term cash over this one. They've abandoned a lot of travel partners sites that are buying traffic.
Google is transitioning from search to content. The travel industry is now shitting themselves. Hotels will be next. Everyone else better watch out.
Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million
#20Waits for the inevitable "we're switching from Lisp to Python" announcement...
I've heard that the Python folks already drove most of the Lisp folks out. Lisp is only used for a very small part of their infrastructure, from what I've been told.
I think that the useful parts (QPX) are still Lisp. IIRC python is more for integration and (their limited) front end.