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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

#101

Post by dan00 »

KirinDave wrote: post #40
sjbach wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a current ITAer working on QPX -- by lines of code, QPX is probably actually split pretty evenly between C++ and Lisp. But accounting for verbosity of C++, the logic is heavily on the Lisp side. I think anyone on my team would consider himself to be a Lisp developer before anything else.

It's so good to hear this. I'm always afraid that Python is going to squeeze out Lisp. It's a total absurdity, but people seem happy to learn Python and that puts a huge pressure on keeping Lisp shops alive.

"It's a total absurdity, but people seem happy to learn Python and that puts a huge pressure on keeping Lisp shops alive."

I think that it's less about learning, because Python is way more similar to languages like Java or C++. Using Python, they have to learn less. Than they discover some cool new features in Python and are bought. Then they don't see any need to bother further with lisp.

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

#102

Post by mcdowall »

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)

Good, having dealt first hand with the terrible data companies like Worldspand and Sabre provide in there xml's I really hope they stick it to em.

Not bitter at all, hmmmm

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

#103

Post by hga »

dan00 wrote: post #101
KirinDave wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so good to hear this. I'm always afraid that Python is going to squeeze out Lisp. It's a total absurdity, but people seem happy to learn Python and that puts a huge pressure on keeping Lisp shops alive.

"It's a total absurdity, but people seem happy to learn Python and that puts a huge pressure on keeping Lisp shops alive." I think that it's less about learning, because Python is way more similar to languages like Java or C++. Using Python, they have to learn less. Than they discover some cool new features in Python and are bought. Then they don't see any need to bother further with lisp.

Wikipedia on Blub: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_%28computer_program...

The interesting question here is what's getting people to try Python but not a Lisp. Perhaps Clojure will help answer that question.

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

#104

Post by khandelwal »

mkramlich wrote: post #99
barfoomoo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

GDS = Global Distribution System. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_reservations_system

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

#105

Post by physgrafer »

mkramlich wrote: post #99
barfoomoo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

OTAs use GDSs too

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

#106

Post by hga »

mkramlich wrote: post #93
symesc wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As far as I know ITA's QPX system has no inherent insurmountable bottlenecks, but I'm not sure Google's scale will make much difference anyway:

There's a C++ backend that collects and massages the various data streams and then loads the data into an in memory database. Much of that is quite parallelizable, e.g there are various data sources, the massaging probably needs only so much global state, etc.

The computational front end is an SBCL process that does its magic based on a copy of the in memory database. One process, one query at a time, that scales out very nicely.

I suspect the biggest tricks besides groking the data (hard since it's so messy and special cased) and their secret sauce that does the routing is maintaining the required availability. There I suspect ITA's service/operations culture has things it can teach the corresponding Google culture.

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

#107

Post by hga »

amirmc wrote: post #22
vessenes wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Returning 2x might also be a good thing for the VCs too. I assume, getting some liquidity back is probably important to them in the current climate.

The most recent investors, who probably invested at least in part based on the promise of RES are no doubt happy to get out with something like this.

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

#108

Post by GFischer »

arnorhs wrote: post #79
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…

This search engine is actually pretty nice since you can see which dates are the cheapest. But there is still this fundamental flaw: I need hopefully need to fly to Salt Lake City in Febuary and I'm staying for about 1-2 months - I search for "Iceland -> Salt lake city" for 50 nights => $2,441 (many dates) - I search for "Iceland -> New York" for 50 nights => $454 (many dates) - I search for "New York -> Salt Lake Ci…

Same here.

I live in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Buenos Aires, Argentina or Sao Paulo, Brazil are major hubs nearby (especially Buenos Aires which is an U$ 30 trip).

Last trip I made to Toronto (Canada) I just booked from Buenos Aires, and saved about U$ 400.

There's also the visa restrictions you have to factor in - for example I can't take any flight with stopovers at the United States because said country is stupid and requires visas for stopovers (!!!) - end result is I won't travel to the US, they've lost at least a few thousand bucks of my tourist money, make me book different carriers (I used Air Canada even though an US-based airline would have been cheaper) and make my life more difficult.

So, booking a flight requires nontrivial calculations for me :(

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

#109

Post by hga »

c1sc0 wrote: post #100
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.

Raw, massaged data. From everything we've been reading ("the industry worships syntax, not semantics"), turning those data flows into something comprehensible is a major trick.

ITA's start in this reminds me of the FU MIT delivered to Xerox when MIT bought their first big mainframe Xerox laser printer in the early '80s. Xerox wanted $100K to reveal the format, so instead a group just took one or more output tapes (a normal data flow was the mainframe wrote to tape and the printer read them) and decoded it.

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

#110

Post by hga »

alexdong wrote: post #85

I hope Google should 'behave' more like AT&T built unix and C rather than like Microsoft built Money. Yes, I am disappointed by this move, not because I worry about the travel industry or the potential monopoly power google is holding in its hand. I'm disappointed because Google has yet to re-define the business rules for growth. Allow me to explain. I understand that as a public company, it's Google's responsibility…

Perhaps ... but this does fit very well with their stated mission:

"to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

(End of first paragraph at http://www.google.com/corporate/)

There are at least two dimensions to this: "organize and make accessible and useful" and "the world's information". You're complaining about inadequacies in the former, this is a move to expand on the latter.

Hmmm, for that matter, they're buying some brainpower that could help them with your specific complaint but also the "organize and make accessible and useful" part of their mission in general.

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