Google And Dodgeball: What Went Wrong?

Mike Masnick at Techdirt is curious why Google's acquisition of Dodgeball has yet to produce anything. I have to agree with him. What happened?The issues surrounding Dodgeball are even more interesting given just how much Google has been talking about mobility in recent months. Just this week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was talking about both wireless and local search at Web 2.0.

But Schmidt's comments are especially ironic given, as Mike pointed out in his post, that Dodgeball's founders very publicly dissed Google and quit their jobs.

Google obviously sees its future in wireless, yet Google has yet to do anything interesting with SMS-social networking service Dodgeball, one of the most promising early Mobile 2.0 startups.

Some Web insiders are beginning to think that Google may not be so good at integrating startups. Certainly the YouTube acquisition hasn't panned out all that well. And Google has acquired a lot more startups than Dodgeball, and we haven't heard much from most of them, either.

In fact, Google may now be to Web 2.0 startups what Microsoft was to software startups in the 1990s.

On the other hand, Google may be using Dodgeball's technology to develop new applications we don't know about. What do you think? Did Google just mess up the integration of Dodgeball? Or did it buy the company just for the technology with no real plans to grow the product?