Microsoft Misses DoubleClick

Microsoft missed the opportunity to purchase DoubleClick, which I had written about before. Lo and behold, look who bought them instead, good ol’ Google! “Bought” might be using the word a little lightly too, more like Google came in, opened up the war chest coffers and slammed the money bags down on the board room table and said “We’ll take it!”. You know, like you’d do as a kid playing Monopoly when you finally landed on Boardwalk.

$3,100,000,000! That’s how much money Google put down on the table in their money bags. And we thought they paid heartily for YouTube. If I had something I thought Google would be slightly interested in now, my heart would be all a flutter with the thought of them courting my company and purchasing it.

The question is, how much is this going to impact Microsoft? Microsoft was looking at DoubleClick and a reported offer of $2B purchase price. That purchase was supposed to help them compete with Google and Yahoo in the online advertising space. Now, their competitor just bought up another huge chunk of the market that’s available and leaves Yahoo and Microsoft in the dust again.

Here are a few quotes from Google’s press release about the purchase:

“It has been our vision to make Internet advertising better – less intrusive, more effective, and more useful. Together with DoubleClick, Google will make the Internet more efficient for end users, advertisers, and publishers,” said Sergey Brin, Google’s Co-Founder and President, Technology.

“DoubleClick’s technology is widely adopted by leading advertisers, publishers and agencies, and the combination of the two companies will accelerate the adoption of Google’s innovative advances in display advertising,” said Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google.

“This transaction will strengthen our advertising network by expanding our access to publisher inventory and enabling us to serve the needs of a broader set of advertisers and ad agencies,” said Tim Armstrong, Google’s President, Advertising and Commerce, North America.

Not sure if I believe the “less intrusive” comment because I feel like no matter where I look I see Google AdSense or Google something.

But the other comments seem to be exactly the areas that Microsoft could have really benefitted from the acquisition of DoubleClick themselves. Who’s in charge of the check book over there at Microsoft HQ? Let’s pony up some money and make an impact on something again.