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Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

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Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#61

Post by SkyMarshal »

jsz0 wrote: post #36
mkramlich wrote: post #10

This event will also have a chilling effect for some travel startups. Though maybe act as an accelerant for others. Either way it will impact almost every company in the travel space. (Assuming its not blocked by govt.)

I'm quite surprised that with some of Google's recent pickups more people aren't concerned about how it may negatively impact competition. We might get a better travel search out of this but I personally would have enjoyed seeing a company other than Google be successful at search for once. Same with AdMob -- Google is already a giant powerful advertising company. Not sure they really needed to gobble up AdMob to be…

Part of Google's challenge may be that many of the best engineers now prefer to go the startup route and build something they're passionate about, rather than join a large corporation, even Google.

And Google's ~$25B in the bank is much better spent buying and integrating those companies than investing in mortgage securities and whatnot.

Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#62

Post by hga »

ra wrote: post #57
hga wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ITA has a big problem: their follow on to the QPX product that everyone has been talking about is a airline reservation, management etc. system called RES. This is desperately needed since pretty much everyone is running these systems on expensive mainframes with ugly old code bases. Dan Wienreb did a very interesting talk, "Lisp for High-Performance Transaction Processing" that covered it and a bit on the future of…

"with Oracle RAC as the backend (pretty much the only choice)" ... not any more!

I don't know this space at all; what are the other options?

Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#63

Post by kiwidrew »

alec wrote: post #44
Alex3917 wrote: post #14

Hopefully 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 sav…

I work at ITA on QPX, the airfare search engine. We've been doing those sorts of radius searches for years, although we don't currently integrate street-level data for any customers that I know of. Head to http://matrix2.itasoftware.com , put in where you are, then click "Nearby" - the default is 50 miles, even! Then ask for a calendar of lowest fares. You can even tell it "I want to stay 2-5 nights". Many of our cus…

I assume that doing these radius searches requires far more computational power than a "simple" single-origin/single-destination search, which surely must translate into a higher cost-per-query for QPX customers. Is this perhaps why very few QPX-powered sites actually offer the option?

Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#64

Post by avar »

hga wrote: post #28
jey wrote: post #3

Is 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.

ITA has a big problem: their follow on to the QPX product that everyone has been talking about is a airline reservation, management etc. system called RES. This is desperately needed since pretty much everyone is running these systems on expensive mainframes with ugly old code bases. Dan Wienreb did a very interesting talk, "Lisp for High-Performance Transaction Processing" that covered it and a bit on the future of…

Is Dan's talk accessible online somewhere? The YouTube video is marked as private (see e.g. http://www.gawkk.com/lisp-for-high-performance-transaction-p...).

Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#65

Post by hga »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #61
jsz0 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite surprised that with some of Google's recent pickups more people aren't concerned about how it may negatively impact competition. We might get a better travel search out of this but I personally would have enjoyed seeing a company other than Google be successful at search for once. Same with AdMob -- Google is already a giant powerful advertising company. Not sure they really needed to gobble up AdMob to be…

Part of Google's challenge may be that many of the best engineers now prefer to go the startup route and build something they're passionate about, rather than join a large corporation, even Google. And Google's ~$25B in the bank is much better spent buying and integrating those companies than investing in mortgage securities and whatnot.

How has Google's history of buying and integrating companies gone? I know about successes like Android or Google Voice, but what about failures? I guess there aren't any epic failures as of yet (we'd know about them), but it's unlikely they've been 100% successful.

Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#66

Post by avar »

jurjenh wrote: post #53
hga wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ITA has a big problem: their follow on to the QPX product that everyone has been talking about is a airline reservation, management etc. system called RES. This is desperately needed since pretty much everyone is running these systems on expensive mainframes with ugly old code bases. Dan Wienreb did a very interesting talk, "Lisp for High-Performance Transaction Processing" that covered it and a bit on the future of…

That, and google has an aversion to common lisp... so it would need to be a rewrite. EDIT: Mind you, I've only heard of the aversion to lisp, so have no data to back my claim up. That said, it has been mentioned several times on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1282583 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363023

The example that is usually brought up is one guy at Google (Erann Gat) that had one conversation with his manager that ended in a "No".

That's completely different to Google buying an existing business for $700 million whose core tech is written in Lisp.

Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#67

Post by alalonde »

ben1040 wrote: post #56
alanh wrote: post #55

> Today, almost half of all airline tickets are sold online. FEWER THAN HALF? Serious question: Who is buying the others, and where?

Corporate travel agents make up the majority of the other half, I bet.

Yes, corporate travel is a huge market, but service companies like Christopherson are probably becoming less relevant in light of all this new competition. Wouldn't be surprised if Google took this on..

Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#68

Post by teamonkey »

bl4k wrote: post #31
amirmc wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fantastic! Thanks for the link. I've been wondering if there was something like that for a while. I hope Google leave it as it is (or improve it).

Not only will they leave it, this is the most important part for Google. I expect that they will spin it into a 'Google Travel' product and take over the travel market pronto

I would expect it to be fully integrated into Google Maps. You can already find a route from A to B using other forms of public transport.

Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million

#70

Post by [deleted] »

kiwidrew wrote: post #63
alec wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at ITA on QPX, the airfare search engine. We've been doing those sorts of radius searches for years, although we don't currently integrate street-level data for any customers that I know of. Head to http://matrix2.itasoftware.com , put in where you are, then click "Nearby" - the default is 50 miles, even! Then ask for a calendar of lowest fares. You can even tell it "I want to stay 2-5 nights". Many of our cus…

I assume that doing these radius searches requires far more computational power than a "simple" single-origin/single-destination search, which surely must translate into a higher cost-per-query for QPX customers. Is this perhaps why very few QPX-powered sites actually offer the option?

[deleted]
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