Comment by jimmar

Starting with an acquisition is a cheap way of accelerating once your company reaches a certain size.

Look at Microsoft - Powerpoint was an acquisition. They bought most of the team that designed and built Windows NT from DEC. Frontpage was an acquisition, Azure came after AWS and was led by a series of people brought in in acquisitions (Ray Ozzie, Mark Russinovich, etc.). It's how things happen when you're that big.

Why wouldn't you count things initially made by individual contributors at Google?

I was extremely surprised that Google+ didn't catch on. The week before Google+ launched, me and all my friends agreed that Facebook is toast, Google will do the same thing but better, and everyone has a Gmail account so there will be basically zero barrier to entry. Obviously, we were wrong; Google+ managed to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory, Google+ never got significant traction, and Facebook managed to keep growing and now they're yet another Big Evil Tech Corporation.

Honestly, I still don't really know how Google managed to mess that up.

Google does abandon a lot of stuff, but their core technologies usually make their way into other, more profitable things (collaborative editing from Wave into Docs; loads of stuff from Google+; tagging and categorizing in Photos from Picasa (I'm guessing); etc)

It annoyed me recently that they dropped support for some Nest/Google Home thermostats. Of course, they politely offered to let me buy a replacement for $150.

They bought YouTube but you have to give Google a hell of a lot of credit for turning it into what it is today. Taking ownership of YouTube at the time was seen by many as taking ownership of an endless string of copyright lawsuits, suing them into oblivion.

Before Google touched Android it was a cool concept but not what we think of today. Apparently it didn't even run on Linux. That concept came after the acquisition.

That is because the DoubleClick parasite has long infected the host.

And to my point, it took Apple to make the iPhone for Google to make Android.

It took OpenAI for Google to finally understand make a product out of their years if not decades of AI research.

YouTube and Maps are both acquisitions indeed.

It is very misleading or outright perverse to write "they were selling software as a service in the IBM 360 days" when there was no public network that could be used to the deliver the service. (There were wide-area networks, but each one was used by a single organization and possibly a few of its most important customers and suppliers, hence the qualifier "public" above.)

But anyways, my question to you is, was there any software that IBM charged money for as opposed to providing the software at no additional cost with the purchase or rental of a computer?

I do know that no one sold software software (i.e., commercial off-the-shelf software) in the 1960s: the legal framework that allowed software owners to bring lawsuits for copyright violations appeared in the early 1980s.

There was an organization named SHARE composed of customers of IBM whereby one customer could obtain software written by other other customers (much like the open-source ecosystem) but I don't recall money ever changing hands for any of this software except a very minimal fee (orders of magnitude lower than the rental or purchase price of a System/360, which started at about $660,000 in 2025 dollars).

Also, IIUC most owners or renters of a System/360 had to employ programmers to adapt the software IBM provided. There is software with that quality these days, too (.e.g, ERP software for large enterprises) but no one calls that a software as a service.