The impending Age Of Abundance was prophecied in the scriptures thousands of years ago.
Image by earcos via FlickrI am going to post a hypothesis. The hypothesis is that GroupOn always wanted to get bought, and it wanted to get bought by Google. From. Day. One. GroupOn plotted for this day to come before its inception. 
Image via WikipediaApple and Microsoft were born around the same time. They were not at peace. Netscape came along. Microsoft killed Netscape. Google offered to sell itself to Yahoo. Yahoo refused. A few years later Bill Gates offered to buy Google "at any price." Google refused. Google tried to buy or bury Facebook. Facebook survived. Facebook tried to buy Twitter. Twitter refused. So Facebook hunkered down and "learned" as much as possible from Twitter. Facebook has tried to buy FourSquare, more recently it has tried to bury it. 
Image by ifindkarma via FlickrThis is Google getting offline. That is a big jump. I hear GroupOn has a salesforce. Google has not had that. This is Google now getting high touch. High tech is no longer enough. Online only is no longer enough. 
Image via CrunchBaseTechCrunch: Why Google Hearts Groupon: Groupon is the clear market leader in the fastest growing new category on the Internet .... “I think the way Google will evolve is they will want to control everything significant on the Internet.” ....... Google Places is increasingly front and center on the main search results page for local searches, and VP Marissa Mayer recently switched from Search to now running Location and Local Services. She is known to be a big fan of Groupon .... Through its online-to-offline coupons, Groupon has figured out how to track that last mile in local online commerce between the ad and customers showing up at a store..... Google could start showing Groupon deals as tags on local searches or within Google Maps. The ability to add deals to their Places pages could make Places more appealing to local businesses as well. ..... scaling the business from one which deals with a few hundred businesses per day to tens or hundreds of thousands .... Groupon still requires a large local sales force to manage these deals, and an army of copy writers to make the deals appealing.This is a case of the dog finally catching up with the car. Google might have missed out on social, but it tried extra hard to get local and location right. That begs the question, Facebook refused to be bought for a billion, and now its market value is 50 billion, did GroupOn just miss out?
Image via CrunchBaseThis is great for Google. But was this great for GroupOn? Why did GroupOn not seek an IPO route? That is the question I find myself asking.
Image via CrunchBaseGoogle Earth is just swell. When it first came out, I downloaded it right away. I saw the country I grew up in - Nepal - in ways I had never seen before. The Himalayas were so awesome to explore on Google Earth. I spun the globe in slow motion over large stretches of Russia. I was a kid in a candy shop.
Image via WikipediaFor one I was thinking GroupOn was not going to want to get bought. It had a great independent future, I thought. But perhaps the GroupOn founders felt like they were a one trick pony, and they were not going to be able to ride the imagination wave year in year out, and another hot company will show up, the buzz will move on. And Google wanted the sexy back bad.
Image via WikipediaI have called Steve Jobs a Pied Piper at this blog several times before. I mean, the guy goes ahead and does iPhone apps. Fred Wilson: HTML5 Mobile Apps: They looked and worked exactly like their mobile app counterparts.... you could cache all the elements, including the database, on the phone and deliver an offline experience in HTML5 in the browser .... I've accepted the mobile app paradigm as something we will be living with for the next five years.But I do realize that HTML 5 is not here yet. Universal wireless broadband is not here yet. And that begets the swamp that begets the mosquitoes: iPhone apps.
Image via WikipediaFarrakhan: Levee May Have Been Bombed To Flood ... flood poor black people out of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.You could argue it was cyclical. It happens every 70 years. The last time was the Great Depression. And there was something like the Great Depression about 70 years before the Great Depression. I guess I will not see the Halley's Comet or another Great Recession in my lifetime then.
