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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

#91

Post by mkramlich »

smaher wrote: post #89
mkramlich wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kayak also runs on top of ITA (only 90% sure, i can't find my notes to confirm right now. i had to know this a few months ago for work reasons)

Yes, it does. It's in the press release at: http://investor.google.com/releases/2010/0701.html "ITA's QPX software tool for organizing flight information is used by leading airlines and travel distributors worldwide including Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Bing, Continental Airlines, Hotwire, Kayak, Orbitz, Southwest Airlines, TripAdvisor, United Airlines, US Airways, Virgin Atlantic Airways and others."

cool thanks!

so like i said... gigantic move in the travel industry :)

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

#92

Post by _delirium »

hga wrote: post #65
SkyMarshal wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dodgeball's a commonly cited failure. The founders left two years after being acquired to start a very similar competitor, which even has a hilariously similar name (Foursquare), and then Google discontinued Dodgeball two years after that.

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

#93

Post by mkramlich »

symesc wrote: post #80
mkramlich wrote: post #5

gigantic move in the travel industry ITA runs behind the scenes at Orbitz and many other OTA's. saying it could cause problems for major players in the market would be an understatement. (I'm a former Orbitz and Cheaptickets engineer, as well as tech advisor to some travel startups)

I dunno. Do people really have trouble finding the cheapest flights with the likes of Kayak and Farecast around already? My question is how this acquisition really helps travelers. I can see how it might help Google possibly become an online travel agent, but how does that help me when the carriers set the prices anyway? Are we hoping for Google discounts or better visibility of seat sales? Or is there something that…

A Google buyout of ITA could improve things in one simple area: resources. As in, way way more. Hardware and cash.

Even if Google made no significant changes to the behavior of ITA's existing code, if they instead just tweaked it to run on say millions of cores, highly distributed and parallelized in Google data centers, with gajillions of cached results -- endusers would probably be able to see better, fresher, more "long tail-y & last mile-y" and faster results. I'm just making an educated guess here, I could be wrong if there's some fundamental bottleneck in the ITA architecture I haven't considered (and someone chime in if you know that to be the case) but I don't think this will be an issue.

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

#94

Post by mkramlich »

avar wrote: post #66
jurjenh wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think they'd have an aversion to buying a piece of legacy software written in Lisp if said software had a proven revenue stream and was part of the core underpinning to a major category of search they want to get into more.

However, it's reasonable for them to be averse to writing totally new projects in Lisp, in-house, because when you're at a huge company as a general rule you don't want dozens of different languages in use: it's inefficient and you lose out on a lot of opportunities to leverage skills across teams and across service layers if you do that. Lisp, from what I heard, didn't make the cut, despite it's strengths. They still allow a few though, and I believe they are Python, JavaScript, Java and C/C++.

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

#97

Post by mkramlich »

hga wrote: post #65
SkyMarshal wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some hits, some misses. It's hard for anybody to say with authority just how many should have been hits but were not. I think it's unrealistic to expect ALL of them to be a net win. Nobody can predict the future, not even Google.

NOTE TO SELF: start a web-based service that successfully predicts the future. Sell out to Google.

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

#98

Post by barfoomoo »

mkramlich wrote: post #5

gigantic move in the travel industry ITA runs behind the scenes at Orbitz and many other OTA's. saying it could cause problems for major players in the market would be an understatement. (I'm a former Orbitz and Cheaptickets engineer, as well as tech advisor to some travel startups)

What does OTA stand for?

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

#99

Post by mkramlich »

barfoomoo wrote: post #98
mkramlich wrote: post #5

gigantic move in the travel industry ITA runs behind the scenes at Orbitz and many other OTA's. saying it could cause problems for major players in the market would be an understatement. (I'm a former Orbitz and Cheaptickets engineer, as well as tech advisor to some travel startups)

What does OTA stand for?

online travel agent (ie. web-based)

to differentiate from old fashioned bodies-in-seats-in-office-somewhere travel agencies that you had to call, fax or stroll into in person. Agents there typically sat in front of either a terminal connected to a GDS like Galileo, or, more recently, a Windows box with native apps doing approximately the same thing. Agents would perform queries for you on their computers and they sometimes had to type in a sort of mini-language full of various commands and brief codes.

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

#100

Post by c1sc0 »

jamesshamenski wrote: post #19

Google 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.

I'm working for kind of a big travel portal and yes, we are shitting ourselves to the point that at least I am considering switching industries. I'm not even sure they did it for the content as much as for access to the raw data.
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