Comments on: Google looks Olive up and down, but then rejects it

By: Yakito

Yakito — Wed, 09 May 2007 18:25:13 +0000

Old war tactic

By: Avi

Avi — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 12:14:30 +0000

I looked at Olive products in depth – under the hood. It’s old school ASP (not .net) and Flash. Much of the code appeared to be developed by a Russian outsourcing company. Poorly structured and absolutely no documentation. Server products only run on Windows – and require recycling often.

All in all, nice reader and some good OCR/scanning stuff, otherwise, I’d pass too.

By: John Battelle's Searchblog

John Battelle's Searchblog — Sat, 13 May 2006 19:35:50 +0000

Melanie’s RoundUp

Y! Answers Beta No More Yahoo Answers plans to drop its beta tag on Monday. Since the launch in December 2005, Yahoo says its amassed a library of over 10 million Answers and 7.2 million unique users. Collexis Fingerprints Yet another search service–…

By: Search Engines WEB

Search Engines WEB — Fri, 12 May 2006 21:26:58 +0000

OF course, the interviews would be very detailed and thorough – this is not a matter to gloss over.

It is more likely that they wanted to be absolutely certain, unanimously, that the product did fully not meet their expectations. They invested alot just to get to that point of interviewing them; these are all busy people.
They were probably accessing the potential of the product, as well as the potential relationship with the current owners.

This is not a decison to take lightly!

Not being an audience to the interview process, no one could reasonably guess what conclusions were NOT reached by both parties.

By: monger

monger — Thu, 11 May 2006 13:11:23 +0000

70M for a company that has been around ~7 years isnt much. With 300+ customers they probably have a headcount >100; so everyone in the company probably would NOT make out. The VCs dont get their 10x investment back. At this late stage for selling, most of the expenses are for sales/marketing vs. core R&D. So I’m not sure Olive s/w would say yes to the deal. The VCs wouldnt be happy, the employees wouldnt be happy; maybe some of the founders would make their millions, but if they have a steady revenue stream from 300 customers they may not need to bail immediately.

So now on to Google’s perspective. The pricing seems low given the competitive advantage of their OCR; if it really works for general formats or is only good for newspapers?

I would guess it’s only good for specific newspaper formats and was hardcoded in to some extent or else you would see this product in other applications ranging from insurance records, medical records, legal documents and so on and the valuation of 70M would be absurdly low.

Since their application base is narrowly focused around newspapers, catalogs, and magazines, I would guess their technology isn’t really revolutionary or orders of magnitude better than current state of OCR s/w like Abbyy.

And, finally. They could get a better price than 70M no matter what perspective you take. 300 customers say this. Just iterate the technology some more.

By: Charlie Kemper

Charlie Kemper — Wed, 10 May 2006 17:06:09 +0000

It’s saddening that a company who’s mission is to “Do No Evil” acts in this manner.

By: Bill G

Bill G — Wed, 10 May 2006 14:30:20 +0000

give us three years and we will kill them.

By: kumar

kumar — Wed, 10 May 2006 09:06:12 +0000

All I can add to this is that we use olive software and we are very happy and impressed with them and the technology. They also have top/first class people and support. Maybe it was olive that rejected google and/or the offer? I can not see any company passing up on olive.

By: Matt Marshall

Matt Marshall — Wed, 10 May 2006 06:58:02 +0000

Wow, that’s eerie.

By: buddy1

buddy1 — Wed, 10 May 2006 06:42:44 +0000

That’s funny, we had been looking at Google Enterprise Hardware and decided to go with Olive for our needs. When Google rep asked me who I went with, I said Olive. He had never heard of them. This was about a month ago. Coincidence?

By: Tijs

Tijs — Wed, 10 May 2006 04:33:31 +0000

Wow, if this story and all these comments are for real that would be pretty bad. I don’t agree with Will though, maybe they have more resources than ideas since a good engineer is not always a good ‘idea person’. For that you need creatives (in lack of a better name) which, looking at their app designs, they seem to have a shortage of at Google.

By: Will

Will — Tue, 09 May 2006 19:52:56 +0000

This seems odd. With Google’s concentration of genius programmers, they should have more ideas than they have resources to exploit them.

By: Backup

Backup — Tue, 09 May 2006 12:58:32 +0000

I happen to know someone who has had the same experience with Google. Since then I see them as an ‘evil’ company.

He has been several times to the US and even talked to Brin and Page several times, all seemed well but the Google engineers asked an awful lot of technical questions. My friend had to sign a paper forcing him to remain silent about this negociation process, but Google signed nothing!

Then all after some months all of a sudden he and his lawyer could no longer get in contact with either Brin or Page…

He has never heard of them since and 6 months later a similar product to the one he made was launched by Google!!!

Google = Evil

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 09 May 2006 08:40:52 +0000

Maybe startups should charge a fee for getting groped and dryhumped. They’d at least get to keep the ring, you know?

By: 太阳黑子

太阳黑子 — Tue, 09 May 2006 04:05:28 +0000

I don’t think so~